What Is It That The Dems Want?
December 7, 2019 at 4:59 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
They’re not taking it.
The basic premise was that most people probably care more about issues that affect their daily lives than about President Trump’s call to the Ukraine. I suggested they should move off the whole impeachment thing.
I get the now-infamous phone call was ham-handed and inappropriate. What else would one expect from this president? But I haven’t heard anyone argue that there was anything illegal about it. And there are salient arguments on both sides about whether it rises to the level of impeachment. (Shouldn’t that be “sinks to the level of impeachment,” by the way?) This, of course, doesn’t excuse the behavior, but what type of punishment needs to be doled out here?
Two previous impeachment inquiries actually involved crimes – perjury and a break-in. One of those presidents resigned – Nixon. The other, Clinton, was acquitted by the U.S. Senate.
The only other impeachment – Andrew Johnson’s in 1868 – was political. It had to do with Johnson’s suspension of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson replaced him with Ulysses Grant. The Senate disagreed and reinstated Stanton. Grant stepped aside over Johnson’s objection. Johnson then fired Stanton and appointed Lorenzo Thomas to replace him. Congress called that an intentional violation of the Tenure of Office Act and impeached Johnson. His Senate trial fell one vote short of removal.
I guess the interesting thing about President Trump’s impeachment to me is the fact that it was preordained. There were Democrats calling for his impeachment before he took the oath of office.They were so incensed by the fact that America elected Trump, they were determined to remove him from office. It was their election to win, and by golly, they were going to win it.
There was the whole Russian collusion thing and the Mueller investigation. That didn’t really pan out, so we’ve moved on to the Ukrainian phone call. My sense of it is that if this Ukrainian phone call doesn’t pan out the Dems will come up with some other way to remove Trump from office.
The problem with this strategy is that fully half the country – including a fair number of independent and moderate voters – think its bogus.
Among independent voters, support for the president’s impeachment is shrinking despite wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the president’s “corruption,” “bribery,” “quid pro quo,” “violation of his oath of office,” “threat to our democracy,” et. al.
Overall, likely voters are pretty much split down the middle on the issue.
There’s this from the New York Times on Nov. 26:
Midterm victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin gave Democrats hope of retaking the Rust Belt battleground states that handed the presidency to Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Yet success in the midterms might not mean as much for Democratic presidential candidates as the party might think. Nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for President Trump in 2016 — but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 — say they intend to back the president against each of his top rivals, according to recent polling by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College.
Key point there – two-thirds.
And listen to what a Democratic fundraiser recently told thehill.com: “After three years, the country was sick of hearing about Russia, and now the average American either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the case we’re making on Ukraine.”
Amid all this everyone knows – and I mean everyone – that even if the House impeaches Trump, he will never be convicted in the U.S. Senate. It takes a two-thirds vote and Republicans have the majority.
It seems like the Democrats have lost their grip on the reality of the public’s attention.
As Democrats have been spending the holiday season fretting over impeachment, what have droves of Americans been doing?
Spending.
Getting a Black Friday jump on their Christmas shopping. National Retail Federation surveys show retailers will pull in $730.7 billion this Christmas season. That’s up 4.2% over 2018.
One could argue that President Trump’s free-market measures – individual and corporate tax cuts, rollbacks of regulations – were bad policies. But one can’t argue what happened to the economy because of them.
Trump’s average GDP growth over the past 11 quarters is 2.6%, easily outpacing President Barack Obama’s 1.9% over eight years.
Unemployment rates for blacks, women and hispanics are at record lows.
Median household income is rising, up 6.8% since Trump’s inauguration.
Wage growth is rising sharply.
Despite slowing in 2019, two years of strong gains led the U.S. to enjoy its best manufacturing job growth in the last 30 years, up by 314,000 since Trump’s inauguration. (A slowdown this year is largely attributable to the ongoing trade war with China, initiated by Trump’s hard-nosed tariff policies. If a trade deal is reached, expect better numbers.)
Overall job numbers released just this week showed a better-than-expected payroll surge of 266,000 jobs, including 54,000 new manufacturing jobs.
The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5% – a 50-year low.
The number of people on food stamps in 2018 was 39.8 million, down from 45.7 million in 2016.
The U.S. is now a net energy exporter. The U.S. has overtaken oil production in Saudi Arabia and Russia on a monthly basis, making the U.S. the world’s top oil producing nation.
U.S. multinational enterprises repatriated $777 billion back into the U.S. in 2018, roughly 78% of the all the estimated offshore cash holdings.
The stock market is surging, up 4.7% since the beginning of impeachment proceedings alone.
With the impeachment proceedings taking center stage 100% of the time, it seems the goal of Democrats is to derail all of this.
I’m wondering why.
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They’re not taking it.
The basic premise was that most people probably care more about issues that affect their daily lives than about President Trump’s call to the Ukraine. I suggested they should move off the whole impeachment thing.
I get the now-infamous phone call was ham-handed and inappropriate. What else would one expect from this president? But I haven’t heard anyone argue that there was anything illegal about it. And there are salient arguments on both sides about whether it rises to the level of impeachment. (Shouldn’t that be “sinks to the level of impeachment,” by the way?) This, of course, doesn’t excuse the behavior, but what type of punishment needs to be doled out here?
Two previous impeachment inquiries actually involved crimes – perjury and a break-in. One of those presidents resigned – Nixon. The other, Clinton, was acquitted by the U.S. Senate.
The only other impeachment – Andrew Johnson’s in 1868 – was political. It had to do with Johnson’s suspension of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson replaced him with Ulysses Grant. The Senate disagreed and reinstated Stanton. Grant stepped aside over Johnson’s objection. Johnson then fired Stanton and appointed Lorenzo Thomas to replace him. Congress called that an intentional violation of the Tenure of Office Act and impeached Johnson. His Senate trial fell one vote short of removal.
I guess the interesting thing about President Trump’s impeachment to me is the fact that it was preordained. There were Democrats calling for his impeachment before he took the oath of office.They were so incensed by the fact that America elected Trump, they were determined to remove him from office. It was their election to win, and by golly, they were going to win it.
There was the whole Russian collusion thing and the Mueller investigation. That didn’t really pan out, so we’ve moved on to the Ukrainian phone call. My sense of it is that if this Ukrainian phone call doesn’t pan out the Dems will come up with some other way to remove Trump from office.
The problem with this strategy is that fully half the country – including a fair number of independent and moderate voters – think its bogus.
Among independent voters, support for the president’s impeachment is shrinking despite wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the president’s “corruption,” “bribery,” “quid pro quo,” “violation of his oath of office,” “threat to our democracy,” et. al.
Overall, likely voters are pretty much split down the middle on the issue.
There’s this from the New York Times on Nov. 26:
Midterm victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin gave Democrats hope of retaking the Rust Belt battleground states that handed the presidency to Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Yet success in the midterms might not mean as much for Democratic presidential candidates as the party might think. Nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for President Trump in 2016 — but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 — say they intend to back the president against each of his top rivals, according to recent polling by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College.
Key point there – two-thirds.
And listen to what a Democratic fundraiser recently told thehill.com: “After three years, the country was sick of hearing about Russia, and now the average American either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the case we’re making on Ukraine.”
Amid all this everyone knows – and I mean everyone – that even if the House impeaches Trump, he will never be convicted in the U.S. Senate. It takes a two-thirds vote and Republicans have the majority.
It seems like the Democrats have lost their grip on the reality of the public’s attention.
As Democrats have been spending the holiday season fretting over impeachment, what have droves of Americans been doing?
Spending.
Getting a Black Friday jump on their Christmas shopping. National Retail Federation surveys show retailers will pull in $730.7 billion this Christmas season. That’s up 4.2% over 2018.
One could argue that President Trump’s free-market measures – individual and corporate tax cuts, rollbacks of regulations – were bad policies. But one can’t argue what happened to the economy because of them.
Trump’s average GDP growth over the past 11 quarters is 2.6%, easily outpacing President Barack Obama’s 1.9% over eight years.
Unemployment rates for blacks, women and hispanics are at record lows.
Median household income is rising, up 6.8% since Trump’s inauguration.
Wage growth is rising sharply.
Despite slowing in 2019, two years of strong gains led the U.S. to enjoy its best manufacturing job growth in the last 30 years, up by 314,000 since Trump’s inauguration. (A slowdown this year is largely attributable to the ongoing trade war with China, initiated by Trump’s hard-nosed tariff policies. If a trade deal is reached, expect better numbers.)
Overall job numbers released just this week showed a better-than-expected payroll surge of 266,000 jobs, including 54,000 new manufacturing jobs.
The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5% – a 50-year low.
The number of people on food stamps in 2018 was 39.8 million, down from 45.7 million in 2016.
The U.S. is now a net energy exporter. The U.S. has overtaken oil production in Saudi Arabia and Russia on a monthly basis, making the U.S. the world’s top oil producing nation.
U.S. multinational enterprises repatriated $777 billion back into the U.S. in 2018, roughly 78% of the all the estimated offshore cash holdings.
The stock market is surging, up 4.7% since the beginning of impeachment proceedings alone.
With the impeachment proceedings taking center stage 100% of the time, it seems the goal of Democrats is to derail all of this.
I’m wondering why.
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