Jonathan Alter makes a strong case for Democrats to move ahead with the impeachment of President Trump. Following are some quotes from his article, “Yes, Impeach – and Make Mitch McConnell Defend Acquittal.”
The Senate will acquit the president if the House impeaches him, true. But that’s not a reason not to do it. It’s exactly why they should do it.
[A cautionary holdup]: The pooh-bahs of the House leadership are proceeding cautiously. One of them rightly told me last week that the worst thing they could do would be to lose an impeachment vote. They need a majority of the House—217 Democrats (plus independent Justin Amash)—which means they must gather at least 87 more commitments by the end of the year. There are currently 235 Democrats.
What’s holding them back is a faulty analysis of the politics of impeachment. They’re still caught in the grips of myopic conventional wisdom about the way the whole thing would actually play out in a trial in the Senate.
Recall that in the July 31 debate, Sen. Michael Bennet repeated the familiar argument that the Senate will not remove Trump from office. If the House impeaches him, Bennet said, Trump “would be running saying that he had been acquitted by the United States Congress.”
Julian Castro shot back: “If they don’t impeach him, he’s going to say, ‘You see? You see? The Democrats didn’t go after me on impeachment, and you know why? Because I didn’t do anything wrong.’”
Conversely, Castro continued, if the House impeaches Trump, the public would conclude that “his friend, Mitch McConnell, Moscow Mitch, let him off the hook.”
Castro’s argument was so persuasive that Bennet did something you never, ever see in a debate—he changed his mind on stage: “I don’t disagree with that. You just said it better than I did. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Note 1: See Alter’s complete article for a fuller discussion of the issue at
Note 2: By dilly-dallying, the House Democrats are losing the public argument to Trump’s supporters as Republicans are relentlessly trying to discredit the investigation of Trump.