Why Steyer is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on Impeachment
Tom Steyer, the billionaire entrepreneur and Democratic activist, is right that the only way to get rid of President Donald Trump is to impeach him. But Steyer is dead wrong – and his millions invested in his impeachment petition compound the problem – that now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.
“The Founders gave us impeachment to answer a reckless, lawless, and dangerous president and every day that his behavior is accepted, every day that you don’t oppose it, it becomes enshrined as the way things are done. You have normalized this presidency, you have normalized his behavior,” Steyer told Politico recently.
True. But accepting Trump and failing to oppose him are not the same as providing aid and comfort to those who would perpetuate his presidency. And that’s what’s wrong with Steyer’s impeachment drive. It’s strategically self-defeating.
Is Steyer Secretly Working for Trump? No matter how many signatures he gathers, no matter how many people feel validated by signing his petition, until Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and hopefully the Senate as well, Trump will not be forcibly removed from office.
So before Steyer’s call for impeachment can even be considered, Democrats must take back the House. Which is why Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is right to warn that “impeachment is not a policy agenda.”
Democrats have shown in campaigns for Doug Jones in Alabama and Connor Lamb in Pennsylvania that the ticket to winning in regions where Trump voters represent a sizable portion of the electorate is to concentrate on issues that people care about: the economy, jobs, education, public safety, national security and – to some extent – corruption in government.
Use those Millions Wisely Calling for impeachment of Donald Trump is not a winning campaign issue for Democrats. Which is exactly why Trump is out there warning his supporters that unless they elect or re-elect Republicans to Congress, the Democrats will impeach him. It’s Trump’s best argument right now.
“We have to keep the House because if we listen to [U.S. Rep.] Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him!’ ‘We will impeach him’,” Trump told a rally in Michigan recently. “Then people said, ‘He hasn’t done anything wrong,’… Oh, that doesn’t matter, we will impeach the president’.”
Steyer ought to pull the plug on supporting the very cause his nemesis prefers as a campaign issue and re-deploy those millions of dollars to elect Democrats to the House.
We need a Nixon moment – August 1974: Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes met with Nixon and told him that he faced certain impeachment in the House. Scott and Goldwater told the president that he had, at most, only 15 votes in his favor in the Senate, far fewer than the 34 needed to avoid removal from office.
Don’t trust Steyer – he is opting for a glitzy hollywood style media campaign to make himself out to be a “savior” for the Democratic Party*, instead of doing the grunt work on less media-friendly races that might actually get something done. He’s at best a “useful idiot” but more likely is as dangerous as the man he claims is so bad. Don’t trust him.
*Also, how do you save a party that’s already dead?