Impeachment Update: ‘House of Lords, We’ve Got a Problem’

Nov. 26, 2019 (EIRNS)—British outlets like the Guardian are taking stock of where things stand after their impeachment circus in the House of Representatives over the last couple of weeks, and they are not happy. The unstoppable juggernaut that they were trying to conjure up has proved elusive.

“Congressional Republicans dug deep in defense of Donald Trump over the weekend,” the Guardian complained, “frustrating Democratic hopes that the impeachment inquiry would build bipartisan support following weeks of testimony laying out how Trump attempted to extract a political ‘favor’ from Ukraine in exchange for official acts, not a single elected Republican stepped forward to criticize Trump.” Even worse, “Other Republicans buttressed Trump’s insistence on a baseless and debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind 2016 election tampering.”

On the other side of the aisle, Yahoo! reports, Democrats in swing states are “flipping on impeachment.” The Nov. 25 wire presented the case of Michigan Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence (D-14th CD), who last June told CNN she was in favor of impeachment: “I feel we should begin that process.... Our democracy is bigger than Donald Trump, and we need to act.” But now Lawrence is singing a different tune: “You can censure, you don’t have to remove the President. Sitting here, knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of kicking him out of office, but I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable.”

What Lawrence is actually saying is that her constituents, like most Michiganders, aren’t buying into the impeachment circus. Furthermore, as fellow Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dingell stated last week, at this point Trump will again take Michigan and also win the 2020 presidential election.

Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign chief Kevin Sheekey made the same admission in a discussion with CNN yesterday: “Mike is getting in this race because he thinks that Donald Trump is an existential crisis and he thinks he’s on a path to victory and he’s getting in to alter that dynamic.” Citing the much-discussed New York Times and Siena College polls that showed Trump beating leading Democratic candidates in the six states that he says define the election (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona), Sheekey went on: “That’s the whole general election. And right now Donald Trump is winning, he is winning that election. It’s very tough for people who don’t live in New York or California to understand that, but that is what’s happening.” Sheekey said.

The New York Post published an article by Salena Zito on Nov. 23 which also pointed to the same hard political reality, under the headline: “Rust Belt Voters on Trump: ‘I’d Vote for Him Again in a Heartbeat.”