In the latest episode of their three-year relitigation of the 2016 election, House Democrats are reportedly investigating whether President Trump perjured himself in written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Consider, after half a presidential term of the public being overwhelmingly against impeachment, Democrats have finally galvanized their entire electorate to back their investigation into whether Trump attempted to use the power of the presidency to extort a foreign government into harming his domestic political foe. The evidence increasingly corroborates the Democratic case, and for once, an impeachment question not politically toxic for the suburban representatives who delivered Nancy Pelosi the House speakership to pursue.
So instead of spending every waking moment focusing on the evidence at hand and attempting to appeal to swing state and suburban voters that Trump may have put our national security at stake in an attempt to alter the 2020 election, Democrats have returned to their white whale: the Mueller probe.
Impeachment is political, not criminal, and Democrats cannot hope to impeach without political repercussions if they cannot keep a majority and gain suburbanites and swing staters on their side. The Mueller probe may have had promise for Democrats once upon a time, but the media set the stakes too high, and Democrats wrung the story dry. Voters weren’t appalled by Trump’s behavior. They were bored by the process.
Now Democrats have a renewed supply of political capital, but by revisiting the Mueller probe, they seem keen to waste it and further expose the point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said out loud: They’re searching to impeach Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the veracity of their case.
That Roger Stone’s conviction would implicate Trump in a vacuum seems obvious. He was found guilty of lying with the potential purpose of protecting Trump, and Trump may have known about it. But politics don’t occur in a vacuum, and voters are done with the Mueller story. Everyone knows this, except it seems, the leaders of the Democratic party.
