Democrats seized on the manufactured media crisis over Donald Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian President to revive their flagging impeachment crusade.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was faced with one crucial decision.
And Pelosi made a giant mistake that could lead to her worst defeat ever.
For months Nancy Pelosi stiff-armed Democrats agitating for the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump.
Pelosi worried that impeachment polled poorly and that the Senate would acquit Donald Trump anyway which would allow the President to campaign on being exonerated from a partisan witch hunt.
But Pelosi may no longer have a choice.
Swing district Democrats are feeling the heat from their base and are caving in to pressure to impeach the President.
Freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that the real scandal was the House not impeaching Trump over his phone call to the Ukrainian President asking him to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter for corruption.
“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior – it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
This pressure campaign turned up the screws on Democrats that claim to be moderates because they won Trump districts.
Minnesota Democrat Dean Phillips became the first such Democrat to call for Trump’s impeachment.
“If the reports are corroborated, we must pursue articles of impeachment and report them to the full House of Representatives for immediate consideration,” Phillips declared in a statement.
Impeachment fever reached a critical mass and Speaker Pelosi finally knuckled under.
Pelosi sent a letter to her colleagues where she inched right up to the line of calling for an official impeachment inquiry.
“This violation is about our national security. The Inspector General determined that the matter is ‘urgent’ and therefore we face an emergency that must be addressed immediately,” Pelosi informed her fellow Democrats.
“If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation,” the Speaker added.
But this strategy carries grave risks for the Democrats.
Impeachment is toxic with voters.
Pelosi granting her blessing for the House to vote on articles of impeachment against President Trump saddles the eventual Democrat Presidential nominee and swing district incumbents running for re-election with an unpopular and unwinnable fight.
Such a move would also make the 2020 election a referendum on impeachment and the Democrats’ governing priorities.
That is a fight they cannot win.
But Pelosi has no choice.
Democrat Congressman Al Green declared that not impeaching the President could depress Democrat turnout next November.
“If we don’t do this rather quickly, the public is going to turn on us. And we are going to find that those who went to the polls and gave us this great majority are going to be very disappointed. They are not going to side with us when we did not side with them,” Green thundered at a pro-impeachment rally.
Pelosi is faced with only bad options.
However, the worst thing any politician can do is get crosswise with their base.
That’s why many pundits believe Pelosi will inevitably impeach Donald Trump because risking the wrath of the Democrat base leaves the party with no hope of victory next year.
Black Eye Politics will keep you up to date on any new developments in the Democrats’ impeachment crusade.
