High crimes and misdemeanors? We don’t need no stinkin’ high crimes and misdemeanors!
Such is the takeaway from an Axios report Friday regarding a “cohort of resistance-minded House Democrats” that wants impeachment of President Donald Trump on Day 1 if the party retakes the House in the November midterms.
Between the Republicans’ current razor-thin majority, redistricting battles and the usual headwinds faced by the incumbent party, the odds are stacked against the GOP keeping the House of Representatives.
As of right now, Republicans hold 217 seats with one independent caucusing with them, while the Democrats have 212. Five seats are vacant.
A mere majority vote is needed for impeachment. In olden times, however — when these things were taken seriously — there were hearings and in-depth debates about the gravity of doing such a thing, particularly when the bar for conviction is two-thirds of the Senate.
The Constitution’s language about impeachment covers a multitude of sins — “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But convincing a super-majority of the Senate — not to mention normal, sane Americans — that Trump has committed any of them would be a stretch.
At this point, however, I’m going to assume that the Democrats would impeach Trump for the unpardonable sin of not crying at the end of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”
While the call for “impeachment first, reason later” is coming from the more aggressive part of the Democratic caucus, the Axios report underlines what a Democrat-controlled House would look like come next year.
“The mere existence of this movement demonstrates just how much pressure lawmakers who have not yet gotten on board with impeachment will face in January of 2027,” the outlet reported.
“This is something that I keep saying to our leadership … we need to have a very concrete, coordinated strategy,” Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat, told the news outlet. She added that the party should “build up the case so that when we are in power in January, we’ve created the conditions … we’ve done the fact-checking, we’ve done the shadow hearings, everything we need to be able to impeach.”
Uh, what case? What’s notable about Axios’ article is that no grounds were given aside from the fact “that more than 85 House and Senate Democrats called for Trump to be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment to the Constitution following his threat to destroy Iran’s civilization earlier this month.”
Yes, a bunch of ninnies got themselves all in a snit about a Truth Social post. There was also talk about the fact that “Republicans began talking about impeaching former [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas months before they recaptured the House in 2022,” but that was because he was refusing to enforce border law.
What are Democrats going to do, impeach Trump for saying that immigration law ought to be enforced? That’ll go over well. But then again, they don’t have to worry about it for another two years, so long as they have the majority and the majority is captive to the party’s most bloodthirsty element.
And let’s not forget that two Democrats have already tried quixotic impeachment attempts against Trump this Congress: Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar and Texas Rep. Al Green, twice. Both of these impeachment attempts were high crime- and/or misdemeanor-free, but the evidence this strategy might work, as per Axios, is that when Green “forced another vote to impeach Trump last December, his support went from 78 Democrats to 140.”
At the tail end of the piece, Axios managed to find a kinda-sane Democrat willing to go on record as to why this is a bad idea: Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, who heads the moderate-liberal New Democrat coalition in the House.
Trump, he told Axios, has “done something in this Congress that justifies the conversation, but we’ve already seen twice unless you’re going to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate … the president will not be removed from office.” Instead, Schneider declared he was “going to work on strengthening American security, making lives better for the American people and moving the country forward.”
Which is going to be what Democrats get elected on, if you listen to their rhetoric. It’ll be “affordability” and “stability,” then “stability” and “affordability,” and then maybe after reversing the words, they’ll pull out a thesaurus and look for a few synonyms. Forget about the fact that all of this chaos and rampant inflation is their fault to begin with: This is the playbook on how to get elected as a so-called “moderate” as a Democrat.
At which point, the playbook gets changed for governance and turned into: “Hot diggity, let’s impeach Trump for killing Jimmy Hoffa! You need evidence? Are you linked to Epstein, too?”
If you needed a reason to get out and vote Republican in November, this is it. Impeachment cannot be used as a delay and campaign tactic. It’s been tried twice before on Trump, and now they’re going to do it on even more specious grounds — really, whatever grounds they can find, if any grounds at all. America can — nay, must — reject this sort of governance.
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