In this week's column, @DanODonnellShow writes about on how the Democratic Party has already resolved to impeach President @RealDonaldTrump this year. #wiright #wipolitics Click To Tweet
January 2, 2018
Special Guest Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
Jane Curtin just might be the most honest liberal in America.
“My New Year’s resolution is to make sure that the Republican Party dies,” she said in a recorded segment during CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage.
While CNN’s hosts blather on about holding the powerful accountable and its elected Democrat guests regurgitate talking points about finding common ground with Republicans, only a long-faded Saturday Night Live star had the temerity to articulate the truth: That the left’s New Year’s resolution is to make sure the Republican Party dies.
Buried in the sixth paragraph is the poll’s finding that 41% want Congress to take no action against Trump whatsoever, meaning that more Americans want the Democratic House to leave the President alone than to impeach him. That The Hill didn’t lead with a headline such as “Poll Shows Support for Impeachment Still Lagging” is very telling.
CNN hosts have no real interest in holding the powerful accountable any more than elected Democrats have any interest in finding common ground with Republicans. They only want them dead.
Not in a literal sense – although it is rather telling that post-mortem is the only time that a prominent Republican like George H.W. Bush is ever lionized – but rather dead politically.
And 2019 is the year that Democrats believe they can kill the Republican Party politically for decades to come.
When they take over the House of Representatives tomorrow, they will almost immediately launch dozens of investigations into the Trump White House, Trump Organization, Trump family; heck, even Trump Steaks if they think it will lead to his impeachment.
Make no mistake, House Democrats will impeach Trump; not because they think Republicans will help them convict him in the Senate, but because they know Republicans won’t. This, Democrats believe, will be an even greater victory because it will take the entire GOP down with the president in the 2020 election and make Republicans politically toxic for the foreseeable future.
A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released to The Hill Friday showed a full 39% of voters want Congress to impeach and remove President Trump from office while 20% want Congress to formally censure him.
This, of course, led to The Hill’s screaming headline in “Majority in Poll Want Trump Impeached or Censured.”
Buried in the sixth paragraph is the poll’s finding that 41% want Congress to take no action against Trump whatsoever, meaning that more Americans want the Democratic House to leave the President alone than to impeach him. That The Hill didn’t lead with a headline such as “Poll Shows Support for Impeachment Still Lagging” is very telling.
News outlets like The Hill and CNN, which approved a recorded segment with a celebrity promising to work toward the death of the Republican Party, can be counted on to do little more than cheerlead and urge on impeachment proceedings.
And there will be impeachment proceedings. The Democratic Party’s base demands them. Exit polls in the midterms that thrust the party back into power showed that a staggering 77% of self-identified Democrats support impeachment. The issue of destroying Trump is quite literally what drove them to the polls.
Impeachment will drive the agenda throughout much of 2019, just as the 2020 presidential election is ramping up. With what seems like a third of the Democrats in the Senate running or thinking about running, they will be falling over each other to be the loudest to call for Trump’s removal from office.
Removal, though, is and never really has been the goal. The perceived destruction of the Republican Party requires that the GOP be “complicit” in Trump’s heretofore unproven criminality. With 53 Republican Senators in the incoming Congress and the fiercest Trump critics – Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker – retiring, it will be next to impossible to get the required 67 votes to convict Trump.
Democrats are counting on this. With the media firmly on their side, they will be able to amplify their idea that Republicans are perfectly fine with a criminal president because, well, they are just as devious as he is. Democrats tried to stop them, but they just didn’t have the votes.
Get rid of all Republicans in 2020, they will argue, and America will get rid of its cancer that has been festering since the 2016 election. Democrats don’t just want to undo the results of that election, they want to make sure that Republicans won’t be able to win any future elections.
In other words, they want to make sure that the Republican Party dies. Jane Curtin is just the only one who’s honest about it.