President Donald J. Trump, joined by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Roy Blunt, R-MO., speaks with reporters prior to attending a Senate Republican lunch Tuesday, March 26, 2019, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Some Democrats, despite suffering a complete failure in the Mueller hearings, are still pressing on for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. With the threat of impeachment hearings in the air, Republicans, Pat writes have signaled to Democrats “Proceed with hearings to impeach and there will be blood on the floor.” Even if Democrats were to somehow manage to impeach the president in the House, Pat notes that “the trial takes place in a Senate run by Mitch McConnell.” Guaranteed a failure in the Senate, Democrats would walk into the 2020 election having accomplished nothing. Pat writes (abridged):
The Democrats who were looking to cast Robert Mueller as the star in a TV special, “The Impeachment of Donald Trump,” can probably tear up the script.
For six hours Wednesday, as three cable news networks and ABC, CBS and NBC all carried live the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the Mueller report was thoroughly trashed.
The special counsel stood by his findings. His investigation was not a “hoax” or “witch hunt,” he said. He admitted that he had found no Trump-Russia conspiracy.
All this we knew, and all of it we have heard for months.
What was new, what was dramatic, what was compelling was how the House Republicans arrived with their war paint on and ripped Mueller and his investigation to such shreds that viewers were feeling sorry for the special counsel at the end of his six hours of grilling.
The Republicans exposed him as only vaguely conversant with his own report. They revealed that he had probably not written his own statement challenging the depiction of his findings by Attorney General Bill Barr.
Mueller’s staff of lawyers, Republicans showed, reads like a donors list for Hillary Clinton.
Mueller, a 74-year-old decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam and a former director of the FBI, sat mumbling his dissents as one charge after another was fired at him, his associates and his investigation.
For this disaster, the Democrats are alone to blame.
The Republican message of Wednesday: Proceed with hearings to impeach and there will be blood on the floor.
Democrats are in a hellish bind.
Should they proceed with hearings on impeachment, they will divide their party, force their presidential candidates to cease talking health care and start talking impeachment, and probably fail.
Impeachment hearings would fire up the Republican base and energize the GOP minority to prepare for combat in a Judiciary Committee where they are already celebrating having eviscerated the prosecution’s star witness.
If Democrats vote impeachment in committee, they will have to take it to the House floor, where their moderates, who won in swing districts, will be forced to vote on it, splitting their own bases in the run-up to the 2020 election.
If they vote impeachment in the House, the trial takes place in a Senate run by Mitch McConnell.
Trump would go into the 2020 battle against a Democratic Party that failed to overthrow the president in a radical coup that it attempted because it was afraid to fight it out with the president in a free and fair election.
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