Once again, Democrats’ refusal to let go of their allegiance to the Clintons may prove politically fatal.
First, the party wasted three years relitigating the 2016 election in order to absolve Hillary Clinton of responsibility for losing to Donald Trump. Now, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are using a defense of Bill Clinton in order to impugn the president.
During the Judiciary Committee’s debate about the House’s articles of impeachment, Democrat Zoe Lofgren claimed that Republicans only impeached Clinton because they ruled that “lying about an affair was an abuse of power.”
“If it is lying about sex, we could put the Stormy Daniels case before us,” Lofgren wrote.
Lofgren should know because she is the rare House member who was actually there when it happened.
The Democrats have a simple but politically tricky case to make against Trump. They must prove that although he did not commit a crime, he abused his presidential power by withholding aid to Ukraine, with the intention of damaging his domestic political adversary. Scholars have long debated whether a president should be impeached for a non-criminal abuse of power, but English common law, the Federalist Papers, and historical precedent would indicate that presidents can be impeached for such abuses.
In contrast, Clinton was impeached for an actual crime — perjury. So, the parallel is not one that Democrats should want to highlight. They have to argue that “high crimes and misdemeanors” don’t necessarily have to be violations of federal law. Clinton’s case only complicates that argument.
Furthermore, Democrats have spent the last two years trying to lock up Trump for the Stormy Daniels affair. They debased themselves so much in pursuing that case that they even lionized Michael Avenatti as he argued that the president committed criminal campaign finance violations. And today, Lofgren just outright lied about this.
After a quarter-century of fealty toward the Clintons, Democrats ought to cut their losses and walk away. It harmed them during Mueller mania, and it might just be blowing up their impeachment right now.
