Profiles in Discourage: Pelosi Chooses Expedience over Principle, and We Will Pay
The
Democrats need to stop putting their fingers in the wind and trying to game out
scenarios that may or may not unfold. Beware, Nancy, of the law of unintended
consequences. Your failure to move forward with impeachment may be exactly what
gets Trump re-elected. Steve thinks Pelosi should stop doing the expedient
thing, and start doing the right thing. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
It was
sad to watch the Mueller testimony, for so many reasons.
Sad to
watch a man who is clearly no longer as razor sharp as he used to be.
Sad to
watch a great man fail to rise to the occasion, a man who allowed his own
personal discomfort with testifying to get in the way of the importance of what
he was testifying about.
Sad to
watch a man who – for all his intellect and brilliance – simply did not
understand how incredibly important it would have been for him to simply read
the words in his own report out loud.
Sad
that he did not understand that it appeared that he was unwilling to stand by
the words he supposedly wrote.
Sad to
watch a man who did not understand that in the world of communication, the
issue is never what you say. The only thing that matters is what
people hear.
Sad to
realize that Mueller, for all his patriotism, felt that it was more important to
follow department regulations and the will of his bosses strictly by the book,
failing to see that his higher duty was to use his position to best serve the
Constitution of the United States and its citizens.
Sad
that a bunch of Republican cowards thought that their most important job was to
smear the reputation and sully the motives of a great American patriot.
Sad
that nobody in Congress understood that the Intelligence Committee should have
gone first, and then Judiciary. That way, the focus would have been on the
ongoing threat of Russian interference in our elections. This would have
provided appropriate context for the discussion to the Trump campaign’s
involvement with Russian, and Trump’s effort to obstruct justice.
Sad
that almost everyone in the United States who tuned in simply listened for the
aspects of the testimony that reinforced their ingoing bias.
But
what was most sad was listening to how Democrats reacted afterward.
Their
was an immediate chorus, with many chanting words to the effect of this in
unison: “This just shows how important it is to enforce our subpoena of Don
McGahn, so America will hear in his own words how the President obstructed
justice!!”
Read:
Mueller failed to turn the tide on the impeachment question, so now our only hope
is getting Don McGahn to testify.
Deus
ex McGahn. Mueller failed to
save us… but McGahn will save us! McGahn will finally make Americans see that
Trump should be impeached!
Most
sad is when Democrats fail to take the action ordained in the Constitution as
the proper remedy for Presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.
Sorry,
Democrats. Stop blaming Mueller. Stop thinking McGahn will have any impact.
You,
Democrats, may have already blown this show with your timidity, your fear, and
your unwillingness to act on principle.
As
this slow-motion train wreck unfolds, we are getting head-on impact lesson in
why it is so critically important to act on principle rather than political
calculation.
Nancy
Pelosi keeps saying that the Democrats cannot act on impeachment until they
have an unimpeachable case. That they should not move forward until they are
certain that the American people will support it. In so doing, Nancy Pelosi is
essentially admitting to leading by polling. She is telling people that she is
leading by putting her finger up in the air to see which way the winds are
blowing, abdicating the moral imperatives that leadership demand.
On a
very practical level, she seems to have missed a critical point: her own
equivocation may be one of the biggest reasons Americans are dubious.
If she
is not convinced he should be impeached yet, why should anyone else be?
If she
was not compelled to act by Mueller’s report, why should anyone be?
If she
felt it was vital to hear from Mueller in person, and now no opinions are
changed, doesn’t that mean we should give it up?
If she
keeps saying, “we have to hear one more witness testify under oath,” doesn’t
that mean that all the prior evidence isn’t enough?
Wake
up, folks. Nancy Pelosi has been kicking McGahn down the road for months,
sandbagging efforts to impeach Trump with a leaden pocket veto.
Somehow,
in all this, she is failing to understand just how much damage she has done to
the Democrats opportunity to win the White House in 2020.
Every
time she raised the bar on what it takes to warrant impeachment, she was
serving Donald Trump better than any of Trump’s own sycophants. By shrinking
from impeachment, she has strengthened Donald Trump’s hand far, far more than she
would have done by proceeding.
I can
hear it now, in that bellicose, pompous, manipulative, deceitful posturing of
the President of the United States:
“The
Dems and their two year witch hunt turned up nothing! If they thought it had
turned up anything, they would have voted to impeach. But they didn’t. It was
all a hoax and a witch hunt, and it turned up nothing! Don’t ask me. Don’t ask
Republicans. Ask the Democrats – they are the ones who concluded that there was
no collusion and no obstruction.”
I know
the other point of view. “Why impeach when you will never get a conviction in
the Senate? Why force Congresspersons in swing districts to make a
controversial vote and risk the House majority?”
Why?
The
first reason Nancy Pelosi should have been leading the charge on impeachment is because she swore and oath to protect
the Constitution of the United States of America.
When a
President commits high crimes and misdemeanors – as the Mueller report truly
did establish – it’s Congress’s duty to act. To shrink from that duty is to
fail in that oath.
So
many, many times we have watched people opt for the expedient, short-term
gimmick instead of taking the hard road of standing firm on a matter of
principle. The truth is that short-term,
expedient answers rarely produce a proud outcome.
John
F. Kennedy wrote a book called “Profiles in Courage.” It was a paean to those
who acted on principle rather than political expediency. It was a tribute to
those who refused to yield to the enormous pressure to conform to the
short-term view. It was a book about doing the right thing.
John
F. Kennedy understood leadership, and he knew that great leaders do not hold
their fingers in the air to see how the wind is blowing.
Great
leaders have a powerful internal gyroscope that empowers them mightily with the
force of personal conviction. They do not wait to be given permission by the
blessing of polls. They act on their principles about what they believe is the
right thing to do.
Not
buying the argument of acting on principle? How about if we examine our
“expedient” approach and realize how flawed it really is.
Nancy
Pelosi believes that articles impeachment passed in the House followed by a
failure to acquit in the Senate will help Trump by “exonerating” him. Yet, in that scenario, it is Senate
Republicans “exonerate” Trump. But by failing to pass articles of impeachment
in the House, it is the Democrats who are exonerating Trump. It is the
Democrats who are deciding that there are no grounds for removing Trump from
office. It is the Democrats who appear weak, timid, and intimidated by
Trump. It is the Democrats who enable
Trump to declare victory, exoneration, and innocence.
A strong
argument can be made that having the black mark of impeachment hanging over
Trump between now and election day – with parades of witnesses who are finally
forcefully compelled to testify precisely because it is the legal equivalent of
a Grand Jury – would do far more damage
to Trump than watching White House staff blow off House subpoenas, running out
the clock until election day.
How
about this, Nancy? Put your foot on the pace of the proceedings, so that the
House impeachment inquiry leads to a formal vote to impeach in October, leaving
no time for a Senate trial before election day. That way Trump has the stain of
impeachment, but no liberating exoneration from the Senate. Please tell me I am
not the only one who has thought of that idea.
Perhaps
at this point, it is true that Democrats should give up on impeachment and
focus totally on winning the election.
But
the reason to reach this conclusion is not because it is good strategy. It is because
they have utterly failed to live up to their responsibility to act in a timely
manner on the mountain of evidence collected in the Mueller report. When William Barr twisted its findings, the
Democrats did not protest. They waited and waited, hoping Robert Mueller would
make it easier for them. Now that Mueller has turned out to be not up to the
task, the Democrats are running after Don McGahn. The more they wait to act,
the more Americans assume that they don’t have a case. Or that they don’t have
the guts.
The
endgame in this farce will not likely be a triumph of political savvy and
strategy. It will more likely be a tragedy borne of a failure to act on
principle.
At
best, Nancy Pelosi is a profile in being too clever by half, believing that her
refusal to impeach Donald Trump is actually the most effective way to reach a
desired end.
More
likely, she is what John F. Kennedy might call a profile in discourage, failing
to lead her caucus to do the right thing for the right reason.
Time To Bury the Impeachment Fantasy
With Mueller out of the way, Tom thinks we
need to stick with the Pelosi plan.
It
would have been nice. Robert Mueller
strides into the hearings, settles in behind the microphone and, displaying a
startlingly powerful baritone and an encyclopedic grasp of his material, weaves
a spellbinding saga of criminal behavior.
The facts were widely known, but somehow, simply hearing this paragon of
virtue patiently explaining them, the obstructions became vivid, real and raw. With Mueller summoning every ounce of the
moral rectitude he had acquired in his heroic career to lay Trump’s crimes bare,
you could feel the tsunami of public opinion changing across America. Mueller’s stentorian performance moved not
just moderate Democrats into the impeachment camp, but the rest of the nation
as well. By the time the sun set, the
real question was whether the Democrats would file for impeachment the next
day, or instead would a trio of GOP wise men (say, McConnell, Romney and Graham?)
pay a visit to the orange man in the White House to tell him the jig was up, to
get ready for the helicopter on the South Lawn to whisk you away to Mar-A-Lago,
forever.
Ah
yes, the fantasy. It was always a fantasy. Robert Mueller was no more going to pull that
off than Neil Armstrong himself was going to walk on the moon on July 20, 2019.
And
now it’s time to move on.
It’s
time for the Democrats to bury the impeachment fantasy, follow the Pelosi script
and get on with 2020. Impeachment is not
the end game: getting rid of Donald Trump as quickly as possible is the end
game. And the best way – the fastest way,
the surest way, the least risky way – is to vote him out in 2020.
Through
that lens, Robert Mueller did us a favor.
He was sooooo bad. Sure, he made
it clear that he had not cleared Trump of obstruction of justice. Yes, he agreed that Trump committed the acts
that comprise the case for obstruction.
He testified that he, Mueller, had never applied for the FBI post,
calling out Trump in yet another lie. And he concluded the Russians did indeed interfere
with the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, and they continue to plot interference even
as Mueller was testifying, and would again in 2020:
Trump had ushered in “the “new normal” as he billed it, with heavy
regret.
But
wow, that delivery! It was the worst
public performance ever on Capitol Hill, at least the worst that had drawn a
mass audience. It was utterly
dreadful. Atticus Finch? I don’t think so.
Folks,
get over it. Even if Mueller had
performed superbly, every GOP Senator would still vote down impeachment. There was no new news to be had, no bombshell revelation in the works, nothing that truly could ever have tipped
the scales, and certainly not with by-the-book, the-report-is-my-testimony Bob
Mueller at the stand. The smoking gun
here is a tape of a phone call from Putin to Trump, horse-trading the 2016
election for all sorts of policy goodies, with a Trump Tower penthouse in
Moscow thrown in. Who knows if a call
like that happened, or a deal of that sort negotiated? But there is no tape. And no tape, no evidence, no smoking gun. And what we have now has convinced exactly one GOP member of Congress to abandon Trump -- and he (Representative Justin Amish) quickly became an Independent.
We
have to move on. Stop the fantasy
now. Don’t make the Don McGahn Testimony the next Great Impeachment Hope. We know
what Don McGahn will say when he’s finally in front of the House Judiciary
Committee. “Yes. Trump did ask me to
fire Mueller. I said no. Then, a few days later, he asked me to lie
about him asking me to fire Mueller. I
said no.” I can practically hear the GOP Senators
yawning right now.
I’m
with her. And I mean Nancy Pelosi. Smartest pure politician of our times. SHE knows impeachment is a loser. She’s wonderful to watch, as she gives just
enough space to Jerry Nadler and the righteous gang to make it seem like, by
golly, if we can get these people to testify and they produce, I sure will give
the green light to impeachment! You bet!
Knowing
full well that it will never happen. Not
with -- hmm, let me check – Donald Trump standing tall with a 90% approval rating among Republicans
(per Gallup, July, 2019). And if Trump
survives a Senate trial – which of course he will, absent that Putin phone call
tape – then not only will the impeachment folly give Trump a boost in his 2020
White House bid (“Yet again, I am vindicated, this time by the Senate, and it
wasn’t even close. No collusion! No obstruction!”), but the Dems also risk
losing the House.
Wait,
what….did you say lose the House??? Yes, that is exactly what I said. Impeachment without a conviction could cause
the Democrats to lose the House.
Does
everyone understand why more than
half of the Democrats in the House are not in favor of impeachment? Because they are worried that if they pursue
impeachment, they put their seats at risk. And they have good reason to
worry. Look at the chart below. The Dems flipped 39 seats in 2018 (excluding
Pennsylvania which was redistricted).
They won those seats by +5 percentage points on average. No wonder only six of those 39 new reps have
come out for impeachment! Those seats
could easily flip back. The moderate
constituents who elected them in 2018, switching from GOP votes in 2016, do not
want impeachment. Pursuing impeachment could
cause these seats to flip back to the GOP in 2020. And with them, the GOP wins back the House!
Winning Dem Districts in 2018
|
Number
|
Margin of Win in 2018
|
Want to Impeach Trump
|
Have not come out for impeachment
|
Remained DEM
|
197
|
+48%
|
95/197 = 48%
|
102/197 = 52%
|
Flipped from GOP to DEM
|
39*
|
+5%
|
6 /39 = 15%
|
33 /39 = 85%
|
*Excludes Pennsylvania
which was redistricted
|
||||
And
those brave Democrats coming out for impeachment? They won their seats by +48 percentage
points! Don’t they realize they are
putting their colleagues in a brutal spot, one that could cost them their
seats, and the Dems their majority, which right now is the only bulwark against all sorts of hideous potential GOP legislation?
It is telling
that only 13 million Americans watched the Mueller hearings, far less than the
19 million that watched James Comey or the 21 million that watched Brett
Kavanaugh. America is, by and large,
done with Mueller. The sad fact is that
very few minds were changed by his two-year investigation, and there ain’t no
Putin phone call on tape.
Politico/Morning Consult just ran a post-Mueller testimony poll on
impeachment and the results were unchanged:
47% against impeachment, 36% for, 16% undecided.
You
know how when someone is losing an argument, they tend to say the same thing
over and over again, just getting louder each time until they are practically
shouting? Does that ever work? The Dems version is: first, Trump should be impeached on the face
of the actual events (e.g., his on-air admission to Lester Holt that he fired
Comey because of the Russia investigation); OK, (louder) now we should impeach based on the Mueller
Report; still not convinced -- OK (shouting) now the Mueller testimony; not yet – (screaming) wait’ll you hear
Don McGahn! But the content remains the
same, only the voice gets louder. It’s
not working; it's not convincing anyone on the other side. As horrific as Trump is, we
have to get real.
Folks,
we cannot blow this. Here’s the Pelosi
plan. Don’t impeach, it’s a loser. Express outrage, great. Let those subpoenas fly and do battle in the courts. Bring McGahn, Hope Hicks and the
crew to the microphone, in public.
Bring the dirt out in the open, and soil Trump with it.
But
let all that go on in the background, with the occasional headline. It may do some damage. But don’t spend your time waiting for
impeachment. It ain’t happening unless
that Putin tape shows up. No, spend your
time registering Democratic voters and
encouraging your candidates to talk about health care, climate change and
income inequality, issues where the GOP is vulnerable. And then when one of the lucky 24 wins the
Democratic nomination, whether it is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg or Wayne
Messam, get on board and work like a
dog for that candidate, as if that candidate were your own.
The
unintended consequence of the Mueller disaster is that now we can bury the
impeachment fantasy and turn to the real task, defeating Donald Trump on
November 3, 2020.
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