Tom Steyer's Impeachment Money Pit

Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer has spent millions of dollars focusing on a campaign to impeach President Trump.  To a degree, it looks like Democratic members of Congress have heard him loud and clear.  The House Judiciary Committee has issued document requests to “81 agencies, entities and individuals with connections” to President Trump.  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has said that he already feels like President Trump obstructed justice.  Coincidentally, Nadler made these comments not long after Steyer held a town hall in his home district designed to put pressure on Nadler to support impeachment.  No member of Congress has gone further than freshman Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib who vowed to “impeach the mother***er” the day her term in Congress began, and indicated her desire to impeach President Trump again just this week.

Now, Steyer has moved onto a different goal: putting pressure on Republicans.  In perhaps the dumbest of dumb moves, Steyer has poured money into running ads in the districts of two of the President’s most vocal defenders; Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan.  Both Meadows and Jordan belong to the House Freedom Caucus. It might make sense for Steyer to target them if they lived in competitive districts but they don’t.  President Trump won Meadows’s district with 63 percent of the vote while carrying 64 percent of the vote in Jordan’s district.  In other words, the voters in these districts don’t really care that their representatives don’t seem eager to put themselves on “the right side of history” as defined by an out-of-touch liberal billionaire who made a lot of his money from investments in the fossil-fuel industry while passing himself off as an environmental purist. Maybe it never occurred to Steyer that some people actually like President Trump.

President Trump has definitely noticed this, calling Steyer out on Twitter and claiming he didn’t have the guts to run against him.  Steyer and all the other impeachment groupies have apparently forgotten about what happened the last time a political party decided to impeach the President of the opposite political party.

In December 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.  The House tried but failed to pass two additional articles of impeachment for perjury in the Paula Jones case and abuse of power.  For starters, only five House Democrats broke with their party to vote with the majority of Republicans in voting in favor of three of the four articles of impeachment and only one voted in favor of all four articles.  Five Republicans voted against the successful perjury charge while a total of thirteen Republicans voted against the obstruction of justice charge.  

This time around, 31 Democrats have to run for re-election in seats that President Trump won.  Many of those Democrats would effectively commit political suicide if they voted to impeach President Trump.  As for the Republicans, only three have to run for re-election in districts won by Hillary Clinton and in all of those districts, she failed to reach 50 percent of the vote. 

As for the Republican-controlled Senate 20 years ago, every single Democrat voted to acquit President Clinton while five Republicans voted “not guilty” on both charges and ten voted not guilty on the perjury charge. Even if every single Republican voted to convict President Clinton, that still would not have come close to the required two-thirds supermajority needed to remove him from office.

Unlike the Senate 20 years ago, the President’s party still maintains control of the Senate.  In order for the fantasy of President Trump’s removal from office, the ultimate goal of impeachment, to become a reality, 20 Republicans would have to vote with Democrats to remove the President from office.

Flashing back to the political consequences of impeachment, the election of 1998 did not turn out in Republicans’ favor.  The election did not resemble most previous (and future) “sixth-year itch” elections; Republicans failed to achieve a net gain in the Senate and actually lost seats in the House.

While Republicans did enjoy a political victory in 2000 with President George W. Bush’s Electoral College triumph over Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore, Bush’s election occurred simultaneously with Republicans losing their Senate majority; at least temporarily.  The 2000 election reduced the number of Republican seats to 50.  For the first 17 days of the 107^th Congress, Vice President Gore cast the tie-breaking vote.  That changed on January 20, 2001; when Dick Cheney became Vice President.  Republicans lost the Senate majority again when liberal Republican Jim Jeffords finally looked and the mirror and realized he had little in common with Republicans on Capitol Hill; switching his affiliation to an “independent” who caucuses with the Democrats. 

The impeachment architects found themselves in the crosshairs of Democrats and their allies in the media and pop culture in both the 1998 and 2000 elections.  Larry Flynt encouraged people to come forward with allegations of extramarital affairs on behalf of House Republicans by offering a handsome financial reward.  In 2000, two of the thirteen “managers” in the House of Representatives, who basically acted as prosecutors during the impeachment hearings, lost their bids for office.  Florida Congressman Bill McCollum lost his bid for the open Senate seat to now-former Senator Bill Nelson while California Congressman Jim Rogan lost re-election to a man who almost certainly salivates about President Trump’s impeachment on an almost-daily basis: Adam Schiff.

While President Clinton lying about his adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky ultimately led to his impeachment, it turns out that top Republicans in Congress who had led the impeachment effort had not exactly kept their marital vows either. The accusations of hypocrisy forced the chosen successor of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingstone to resign. The Speakership ultimately went to Dennis Hastert, who ended up facing sexual misconduct allegations of his own after leaving office nearly a decade later.

20 years later, it looks like the Democrats hope to impeach President Trump for financial crimes; namely campaign finance violations. Mirroring what happened to Gingrich and Livingstone 20 years earlier, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become the subject of a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission for using “two affiliated political action committees to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into a limited-liability company to evade campaign finance laws.” According to Business Insider, the complaint, filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, “says that the Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats PACs described all of the LLC’s services as ‘strategic consulting,’ rather than fundraising, phone-banking, and other activities it potentially conducted.” A separate complaint, filed by the Coolidge-Reagan Foundation, alleges that Ocasio-Cortez “illegally paid her boyfriend, digital marketing consultant Riley Roberts, through the PACs and the LLC.” 

The previous two Presidential impeachments occurred either in the President’s second term or towards the end of the term of a President who decided not to run for re-election.  If Democrats have their way, President Trump’s impeachment will take place before the conclusion of his first term.  They should really think about what happened to President Clinton when the House voted to impeach him.  A Gallup poll pegged his approval rating at 73 percent on December 19, 1998; the day the House voted to impeach him.  While President Trump’s approval will likely not rise to such an impressive number, his impeachment will likely unify Republicans in a way not seen since the Kavanaugh confirmation.  Republican unity as well as independent dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ obsessions with impeachment and other far-left pipe dreams will surely ensure President Trump’s re-election.

As I noted in one of my very first blog posts, impeachment is not the same thing as a recall. The Democrats seem to believe that with President Trump’s removal from office, a liberal Democrat will immediately ascend to the Presidency.  In the event of President Trump’s successful removal from office, Vice President Mike Pence would ascend to the Presidency.  Roseanne Barr, a culturally liberal Trump supporter, reminded Jimmy Kimmel of this as he trashed President Trump.  Liberals have had a variety of reactions to the idea of a President Pence. Impeachment cheerleader Maxine Waters has indicated that she would immediately begin attempting to impeach a President Pence while liberal Republican Christine Todd Whitman said that she would tolerate a President Pence in the short term if that meant ridding the country of President Trump.  Based on the events of recent weeks, it seems unlikely that President Pence would receive a warm reception from the cosmopolitan PC police in Hollywood that act as the executive council of the Democratic Party.  Actress Ellen Page effectively blamed the Vice President for the now-debunked hate crime against gay black actor Jussie Smollett while actress Cynthia Nixon went bananas when former Vice President Biden had the audacity to refer to Pence as a “decent guy.” 

Since the halfway point of President Trump’s first term has come and gone, the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution would enable Vice President Pence to run for a full term in 2020 and another full term in 2024.  If the Democrats really want to take out President Trump, the 2020 Presidential Election looks like their best option to do so.

In the long run, Republicans may have actually lucked out by failing to remove President Clinton from office. President Clinton’s removal from office would have made Al Gore President in 1999, giving him a leg up as an incumbent in the 2000 election.  Since World War II, the incumbency advantage has enabled every incumbent President seeking re-election to win re-election all but three times. Even Presidents who ascended to the office from the Vice Presidency won election to a full term two out of three times. Ford, whom the American people had never elected Vice President or President, did not enjoy the same luck. Since the impeachment proceedings took place after President Clinton’s sixth year in office, the 22^nd Amendment would have permitted Gore to run for a full term in both 2000 and 2004.  In retrospect, America really dodged a bullet by not having a President Gore.

So Tom Steyer and friends can spend all the money they want on the impeachment effort.  As of right now, it looks the money will proverbially go down the drain; joining all the money liberals spent on Hillary Clinton and Jon Ossoff as well as the money that Republicans spent on Jeb Bush in America’s campaign finance graveyard.  Steyer could do himself a lot of favors by pouring all that money into something that Democrats pretend to care about; such as infrastructure or higher education.  Don’t bet on it.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 59 percent of Americans do not want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.  Only 35 percent of Americans agree with Tom Steyer. With that in mind, liberals should keep beating the impeachment drum.  Before he goes bankrupt, Mr. Steyer should keep in mind that mpeaching President Trump will do more for his re-election than the economy, judges, and the fear of socialism combined.