CNN political pundit Chris Cillizza warned Democrats that impeaching President Trump could backfire on them.
“Remember this: Pelosi did not want to go down the impeachment path,” Cillizza wrote Wednesday. “She stood athwart her party over the summer as more and more of her Democratic members announced their support for an impeachment inquiry over Trump’s conduct in connection to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
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Public support for impeachment has dipped from 52% to 46%, while Trump’s job approval rating has gone from 39% to 45%, Cillizza noted.
Democrats are impeaching Trump on two articles: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The process centers on Trump’s relations with Ukraine and a July 25 phone call during which he pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. An intelligence community whistleblower reported the incident, sparking the House investigation.
The whistleblower report, Cillizza says, was the incident that forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand and carried Democrats into dangerous political territory.
“But simply because Pelosi acquiesced to that inexorable momentum does not mean that her concerns about the politics of impeachment had changed,” he said. “What Pelosi knew then — and knows now — is that impeachment is a chaos-creator in the American electorate. There is simply no certainty about how the voters — particularly the small number of independent and/or undecided voters — will react to all of this.”
