Rich Lowry‘s latest column at National Review Online focuses on Democrats’ current political objective.
American politics is now, in large part, a fight about whether or not Donald Trump will be impeached.
No one is saying it explicitly, but these are the stakes in the Russia controversy and its spinoffs and in the 2018 midterms. If Democrats take the House with anything like a comfortable majority, they will be hard-pressed to resist their base’s drive to give Trump a mark of dishonor shared only by Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
Presidents have been hated by the other side before, but rarely with this sort of intensity and immediacy. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln (seven Southern states seceded before he took office), it usually takes time for critics to work up a good, unbridled loathing. Herbert Hoover had to preside over the beginning of the Great Depression. Richard Nixon had to bomb Cambodia and get embroiled in Watergate. Donald Trump just had to show up.
The Left’s anti-Trump rhetoric has been catastrophist from the beginning. …
… It may be that Democrats don’t take the House, or even if they do, they pull up short on impeachment. A House impeachment vote would almost certainly only be a symbolic gesture. The chances of getting the two-thirds of the Senate necessary to remove Trump from office are close to nil, unless there’s an offense that collapses his support among Republican senators.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has been cautious, saying that impeachment has to be a factual, not an emotional, project. But it may be that impeachment becomes de facto Democratic orthodoxy whether the party’s leadership likes it or not. The grass-roots group MoveOn.org has already called for it (and before Comey’s testimony).
