Impeachment is a political process. And judging the process strictly on political grounds, the impeachment of President Trump hasn’t been a success for Democrats.
After all, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff haven’t gotten any closer to convincing a single Senate Republican to remove the president. It’s highly probable that a Senate trial run by Republicans, with new witnesses and evidence, would further corrode the Democrats’ case.
Liberals will pretend that Senate Republicans are members of a reactionary Trump cult, but if there had been incontrovertible proof of “bribery,” a number of them would be compelled to act differently. No such evidence was provided.
Adding an obstruction article, based on the Mueller report, would only make the proceedings even more intractably partisan. Yet the recent push to force White House counsel Don McGahn to testify suggests Democrats could be headed in that direction.
In any case, what we can look forward to in a Senate trial is more Ukrainian drama. Far from weakening Trump in 2020, the story might end up dragging Joe Biden into a defensive posture. Journalists perfunctorily refer to anything related to Ukrainians or the Bidens as a “conspiracy theory,” but it’s clear that Hunter Biden was cashing in on his father’s influence, and it’s still unclear what Joe Biden did about it.
Republicans have already requested transcripts of conversations between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the vice president’s requests to fire Viktor Shokin. It’s going to become a difficult story to ignore.
So what is the upside? At first, Democrats claimed that polls were irrelevant because impeachment was a moral and patriotic imperative. Once national support spiked, numbers suddenly mattered very much, and the usual suspects couldn’t stop talking about them. What most polls now confirm is that while Americans were paying attention to the breathless media coverage, public support for the inquiry is at best stagnant and probably declining.
The FiveThirtyEight average for support among independents topped out at 47.7 percent in late October. It sank to 41 percent during the hearings. A November Politico/Morning Consult poll found that voter opposition to the impeachment inquiry is at its highest point since it started asking the question.
Will support for impeachment miraculously surge upward in battleground states such as Wisconsin as the election approaches? It seems unlikely.
Democrats and the media have covered every development of the many investigations into Trump, tending into histrionics. That has, in many ways, obscured legitimate criticism of the president. By constantly overpromising and underdelivering, Democrats have guaranteed not only skepticism but apathy from voters.
Take Schiff, who once claimed to be privy to hard evidence — which never materialized — of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Russian regime. In his closing statement in the impeachment hearings, he argued that Trump’s actions toward Ukraine go “beyond anything Nixon did.” At first Democrats set out to prove a quid-pro-quo charge, which has since been revised to “bribery.” The rationale was that it was a criminal concept that Americans could more easily grasp. But Schiff couldn’t provide the evidence for it. Instead, he offered a slew of witnesses who depicted a self-serving, volatile and impulsive Trump.
None of that is a surprise to anyone who’s ever heard the president speak.
If lame-duck Republicans such as Will Hurd, who hasn’t been afraid to be critical of the president, saw no “compelling, overwhelmingly clear and unambiguous” evidence of “bribery or extortion,” who are you convincing exactly? To be sure, Hurd may change his mind.
It’s also possible that vulnerable Democrats will change theirs first. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) recently said she favored censuring, not impeaching, Trump: “We are so close to an election. . . . I don’t see the value of taking him out of office.”
Then she backpedaled. But she may have stumbled onto a solution. If Democrats back out of impeachment, they will be scorned by the base as a bunch of simpering cowards. But the anger of the resistance fighter can never be satiated anyway. With censure, Democrats would condemn Trump without putting their vulnerable members in danger.
Here is a pertinent question someone might want to poll: “Based on everything you have seen, read, or heard about the allegations against President Trump and Ukraine, which of the following is the best way for Democrats to proceed? 1) Impeach. 2) Censure. 3) Nothing.” There’s a good chance Lawrence’s position would be the most popular.
Twitter: @DavidHarsanyi