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- Impeachment
Reader R wrote in to ask about why a bunch of Democrats are going to vote to table Rep Shri Thanedar’s impeachment resolution. Here’s Axios’ piece:
A rogue Trump impeachment push was criticized as "idiotic" and "horrible" in a closed-door House Democratic meeting Wednesday, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The comments from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) were met with applause from lawmakers and backed up by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), according to six sources familiar with the matter.
Nadler, the former top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Rep. Shri Thanedar's (D-Mich.) efforts "idiotic" and urged Democrats to vote for a Republican motion to kill his articles of impeachment.
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said at the meeting that Democratic leadership will vote for the GOP motion.
Axios makes a couple more points: Thanedar is accused of misrepresenting support and co-sponsors for impeachment, and Nadler is one of the reps who was listed as a co-sponsor for a short time, but later had his name removed. So, Thanedar might have screwed up and pissed off some of his colleagues.
That said, this quote attributed to Nadler is nonsense:
He said that unity against the measure would help protect House Democrats who are politically vulnerable — either to primary challengers who say they need to do more to fight Trump, or general election opponents who would use a vote for impeachment against them.
"People's sense is that it's a total distraction and waste of time given [that there is] no path to victory," a senior House Democrat who was in the room told Axios.
A vote for an impeachment resolution has to be one of the most politically defensible votes of the session. Also, it’s not like the House floor is clogged with meaningful legislation: floor action Wednesday was on a resolution about anti-semitism and a bill to increase the weapons carry permissions for law enforcement officers.
I also think that a vote against impeachment will hurt any Democrat who did it in a primary. I don’t know why that’s not obvious. Perhaps its because they are being told that by Shadow Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “She said that, in the past, the party has always adopted a measured strategy when it comes to impeachment in order to avoid the appearance it being a purely political.”
Well Yahweh fucking forbid that the Democrats appear “political”.
Floor action for Wednesday is over as of this writing, so the motion to table may come up tomorrow, or perhaps some other parliamentary move will be used to keep impeachment from being voted on (though that’s apparently quite hard to do.)
The tl;dr on this is: Thanedar stepped out of line, the hierarchy squashed him, and the hierarchy expects that people are too stupid to see that a vote to table isn’t a vote to not impeach. They want to keep doing very little.
Of course, I believe that they should be voting to impeach Trump pretty regularly. The Democratic leadership thinks that taking a vote where they know they’re going to lose shows weakness. I think it makes a point. I also think that every single Democrat who votes to table an impeachment resolution should be primaried.
(I’ll be traveling until Tuesday, so posting from me will be slim to none.)
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