Here’s the latest sign that Democrats are not at all serious about joining with Republicans to do what Congress and President Trump can to help resolve affordability issues for all Americans. Not that refusing to go along with making Trump’s first-term tax cuts, no taxes on tips, and no taxes on overtime, didn’t already send that message.
Axios reported Friday morning that House Democrats are deep in discussions about whether to impeach Donald Trump a third time if they win the majority. Not whether they could. Whether they should.
Nobody has voted yet. Early ballots are only now going out. And the conversation inside the caucus has already moved past the election to the sequencing of the prosecution.
One of the worst members of Congress ever — left-wing hack Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland — is at the center of it, which is unsurprising given that he’d chair Judiciary if the gavel changes hands. He told Meet the Press last month that impeachment isn’t a taboo for Democrats and isn’t a fetish either — it’s a tool in the toolbox, and they won’t hesitate to use it. Asked directly whether Trump has committed new impeachable offenses, his answer was one word: undoubtedly.
He then listed them. War without a declaration. Defying Congress on spending. Running what he called the most corrupt administration in American history. Yada, yada, yada. We’ve all seen this movie before.
Notice what’s absent from that list — any process by which those conclusions were reached. No hearings. No evidence. No committee record. The ranking member of the Judiciary Committee has already rendered his verdict and is waiting on the jurisdiction to make it official.
He has company. New York socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said earlier this year she’d vote to impeach, accusing the president of shredding the Constitution. Another left-wing hack, California Rep. Ro Khanna, told NBC that a third impeachment wouldn’t be a mistake because it’s about setting a standard. Right.
That phrase deserves a second look. Setting a standard. Khanna is right that it would — just not the one he means. Three impeachments of one man, two of them already concluded without conviction, would establish impeachment as what the opposition party does when it controls the House. Not a constitutional emergency brake. A routine procedure, filed shortly after the swearing-in, for disagreements over policy issues and execution – not actual violations of the Constitution.
Khanna’s answer to the obvious objection is that Democrats can impeach while also running a hundred-day agenda on the cost of living. Anyone who watched 2019 and 2021 knows how that allocation of committee time, floor time, and attention actually works out. Impeachment is not a side project. It consumes a Congress.
And again, Democrats haven’t done diddly squat for two years to help Republicans pass an affordability agenda. Senate Democrats spent one day last week killing a bill on electricity prices and another killing a congressional stock trading ban paired with voter ID. That’s the governing agenda they offered when they had the chance to offer one.
Trump told House Republicans back in January that if they lost the midterms, Democrats would find a reason to impeach him. It sounded like a campaign line at the time. Raskin has now said it himself, on television, in plainer language than any Republican ad writer could have managed.
Ballots are in the mail. Republicans who sit this one out will be handing him the gavel he’s been measuring for since January.
