What Pelosi Really Wants From Impeachment
By Charles Lipson 10-15-19
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/15/what_pelosi_really_wants_from_impeachment_141494.html
https://archive.is/39tji

Schiff’s closed-door sessions, his refusal to allow Republicans to call witnesses, and his prohibition of White House participation are all clear indications of Pelosi’s strategy. She and Schiff are using the investigation as publicly funded opposition research, complete with subpoena power, much like the probe that resulted in the second volume of Robert Mueller’s report.

She can either drop the endless investigations and face the wrath of her party base, or she can plunge ahead, call it impeachment, and hope to defeat Trump next year. She has chosen the latter.

This impeach-and-be-damned strategy is risky. It is already hurting vulnerable, centrist Democrats, and the damage could mount. Ukraine is the only plausible issue for impeachment, but that focus has already knee-capped the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. His son, Hunter, earned big money from a Ukrainian energy company without any qualifications beyond his DNA. The more Democrats focus on Ukraine, the worse for Biden.

More damage is coming if impeachment reaches a House vote. Pelosi holds the speaker’s gavel because centrists Democrats won in districts Trump carried three years ago. Their voters’ central message was to work with Republicans and get things done. These newly elected officials couldn’t accomplish that. The fault may not be theirs, but they still have nothing to show voters back home. If they lose next year, Pelosi could lose her gavel. That’s one reason she has postponed a floor vote to authorize the inquiry. But she can’t delay forever or deliver on the centrists’ promise to pass significant, bipartisan legislation.

This drama is building to a nasty climax: a dirty campaign from now until November 2020. Trump and his allies will run on a strong economy and against a “do nothing” Congress controlled by “radical socialists.” Democrats will run against a “corrupt, erratic, self-dealing Trump and his spineless supporters.”

Unless the Democrats can find a clean, competent, center-left candidate to lead them, they face a difficult task. They will need to sell the public on unpopular, brutally expensive new Washington programs. That agenda doesn’t just split the country, it splits the Democrats. What unifies them is hating Trump and everything he stands for.