There Doesn’t Have to Be One

Democrats loathe Donald Trump and that seems to be enough, writes Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness.

House Members to Go on Record

They would have impeached him on day one of his presidency before he set foot in the White House but they did not have control of the House. Now they do, so they can. Who cares whether he is convicted in the Senate? House members just want to go on record that they impeached him and put an asterisk on his presidency at worst, and at best drive his polls down to prevent his reelection.

Impeachment without Moral or Legal Grounds

The only hesitation after January 2018 when they took over the House was the completion of the Mueller investigation that seemed a certain road to impeachment. When that failed, it took just a few weeks to recoup, get their spirits back up, and resort to the prearranged fallback whistleblower tact. Now they are back on track.

Sane observers see impeachment as a travesty without either moral or legal grounds to justify removing an elected president 13 months before the 2020 election. But sanity means nothing these days, given the hatred of Trump, the volatility of the electorate, and the furious bias of the media.

Hearsay from the Democratic Partisan Whistleblower

After all, we are planning to impeach a president on the basis of a “whistleblower” who will not come forward, who is a Democratic partisan, who worked for a current Democratic presidential candidate, who contrary to the whistleblower statutes went first to the Democratic Chairman of what is now the impeachment inquiry committee, Adam Schiff, also chair of the Intelligence Committee, and whose formal complaint was prepped by Democrat-affiliated lawyers. The whistleblower claims second-hand knowledge from leaking White House Staffers who heard a confidential Trump conversation—a conversation whose transcript was immediately released and was at odds in key places with the whistleblower’s second- and third-hand versions.

Is America Headed for a Train Wreck?

No one knows for certain which outcome is most likely. Will Trump be so beaten down by the ordeal that he will say and do things that will add to the momentum to convict him? Will there be such chaos and disruption that Trump “fatigue” will ensue, and he and those who support him will be blamed for the mess? Will the voter go into a fetal position and just scream, “I can’t take this anymore! Make it all just go away!”?

Will Impeachment Backfire?

Will the jump-the-shark travesty finally confirm that the last three years have been an unhinged, evidence-free Democratic effort to destroy the elected president? Will there be hell to pay for the Democrats for their bias and partisanship that took the country through yet another miasma? They may well earn a Trump landslide and 2020 losses in the Senate and House.

Will Americans Say No Mas?

Americans are tired of the histrionics of these nonstop beltway melodramas. Impeachment won’t turn off or win over that many voters. Most Democrats will vote against Trump; most Republicans vote for him. And as always, the swing voters, party moderates, and independents will decide the day, mostly on their perceptions of either economic good times or an unforeseen 2020 recession—or what comes from Michael Horowitz, John Durham, John Huber, and Bill Barr. It is not impeachment, stupid!

More from VDH here.