James Piereson:
“…Now they propose to impeach the President on the basis of testimony from a cia plant in the White House, Democratic partisan, member of the Obama administration, and friend and ally to former Vice President Biden, who heard third- or fourth-hand about the President’s call with the President of Ukraine, and then worked hand-in-glove with Rep. Schiff to concoct a “whistleblower” complaint that he proposes to use as a basis for impeachment. The phone call in question took place the day after Robert Mueller’s embarrassing congressional testimony about his “Russia” investigation. Plainly some Democrats concluded, once Mueller’s testimony sunk in, that “we have to make another run at this guy.” The “whistleblower” complaint followed as night the day.
This gambit is never going to fly with Republicans or with Republican-leaning voters. It is plainly absurd, and a desperate follow-up to the failed Russia investigation. Still, they are determined to proceed—and no doubt will get a majority of the House to vote for impeachment, because they decided long ago that this might be the only way they can get rid of a President they despise. This is a measure of their faith in American voters.
In a time of norm-breaking, Democrats are breaking new ground on impeachment: they are using impeachment as a campaign strategy to weaken President Trump in the hope they can elect a Democrat to the presidency next November. They also think that by impeaching him they will discredit his election victory in 2016. This is also a piece of their campaign strategy: he never should have been elected in the first place.
Say what you will about impeachment, that it will always be political and not narrowly legal in nature—it has never been deployed as a feature of an election strategy, or as a means of reversing an election result. This is a new step, and one that will only reinforce partisan polarization that has already crossed beyond the limits of rationality. In the annals of cynicism and norm-breaking, this scheme deserves a prominent place…”