THE MOUNTAIN LABORED AND BROUGHT FORTH A MOUSE:
This impeachment drive is a huge political bust for Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff haven’t gotten any closer to convincing a single Senate Republican to remove the president. It’s highly probable that a Senate trial run by Republicans, with new witnesses and evidence, would further corrode the Democrats’ case.
The Left pretends that Senate Republicans
are members of a reactionary Trump cult, but if there had been incontrovertible proof of “bribery,” a number of them would be compelled to act differently. No such evidence was provided.
Adding an obstruction article, based on the Mueller report, would only make the proceedings even more intractably partisan. Yet the recent push to force White House counsel Don McGahn to testify suggests Democrats could be headed in that direction.
We can look forward to a Senate trial with more Ukrainian drama. Far from weakening Trump in 2020, the story might end up dragging Joe Biden into a defensive posture. Journalists perfunctorily refer to anything related to Ukrainians or the Bidens as a “conspiracy theory,” but it’s clear that Hunter Biden was cashing in on his father’s influence, and it’s still unclear what Joe Biden did about it.
Republicans have already requested transcripts of conversations between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the vice president’s requests to fire Viktor Shokin. It’s going to become a difficult story to ignore.
Democrats
claimed that polls were irrelevant because impeachment was a moral and patriotic imperative. Once national support spiked, numbers suddenly mattered very much, and the usual suspects couldn’t stop talking about them. What most polls now confirm is that while Americans were paying attention to the breathless media coverage, public support for the inquiry is at best stagnant and probably declining.
The FiveThirtyEight average for support among independents topped out at 47.7 percent in late October. It sank to 41 percent during the hearings. A November Politico/Morning Consult poll found that voter opposition to the impeachment inquiry is at its highest point since it started asking the question.
Will support for impeachment miraculously surge upward in battleground states such as Wisconsin as the election approaches? It seems unlikely.
Democrats and the media have covered every development of the many investigations into Trump, tending into histrionics. That has, in many ways, obscured legitimate criticism of the president. By constantly overpromising and underdelivering, Democrats have guaranteed not only skepticism but apathy from voters.