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By Yvonne Sam
Contributing Writer
It has become apparent that the Democrats are seemingly in desperate need of guidance before their eventual riddance. Do they really believe that an impeachment, just before a general election, is the correct thing to do or the right way to go, morally and politically?
There they are, fully convinced that with President Donald Trump’s call to his Ukraine counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, they have him exactly where they want him. We have travelled down that road before. The Russia probe was supposed to terminate in impeachment. It did not.
Claims made in the book, Fire and Fury, written by Michael Wolff, were supposed to end the presidency. Again they did not. Neither did the raunchy tales of Stormy Daniels, nor the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. The truth be told, neither did a plethora of other allegations, slanders, and stories — some true, some not true at all.
This time is no way, shape, or form different, and it is my belief that the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is fully aware of this. She has been pressed hard, and hard-pressed, to pursue impeachment by her younger more radical colleagues — in and out of “the squad” — as well as their activist supporters, and many of the party’s presidential hopefuls.
She has valiantly fought the war on crazy and has resisted until now. Her current decision to change course and proceed with impeachment, is more likely than not the culmination of the pressure, along with the cumulative effect of frustration that none of the prior predictions came true.
Sadly, frustration and anger are bad leaders and lead to bad decisions — decisions of which the Democrats are likely to pay a costly price. None of the fuss has done any lasting damage to the President. His approval ratings have bounced around in more or less the same range since he assumed office.
Former Vice-president and current Democratic presidential hopeful, Joe Biden, bears the greater political risk. Democrats are obsessed with the part of the phone call, where Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky discussed the potential sale of javelin missiles to Ukraine and the location of servers examined by the American cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.
The President is particularly interested in the servers, because he strongly feels that they could shed some new light on the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers in 2016. The president also brings up Biden saying, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around saying that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it…. It sounds horrible to me”.
In that and other statements, Democrats see an impeachable offense. Many others see it as one Head of State asking another for an investigation into potential corruption, involving the Bidens.
Surely Speaker Pelosi knows (or should she be told), that there are not 67 votes in the Senate to convict President Trump of anything relating to his phone call with President Zelensky. Hence it is just political theater.
Let us hang on to some other facts here: Hunter Biden was on the Board of Burisma, a huge natural gas company in Ukraine, earning a monthly salary of as much as $50,000 U.S. Why was he there?
Incidentally, at the same time he was there, his father, Joe, was overlooking American policy in Ukraine, and later talked boastingly about how he had pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor there.
Irrespective of what view one may hold, there is absolutely no way to look into the honesty and integrity of Donald Trump’s telephone conversation with Zelensky, without also asking some uncomfortable questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine during Barack Obama’s second term and Joe Biden’s actions while Vice President. Before attempting to expose the closet of the Republicans, Democrats should first ensure that their closet contains no skeletons or trace of fossils.
The Democrats are treading on dangerous political ground. Impeachment is a matter of the utmost national importance, and its success requires broad public support.
To open impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon the vote in the House was 410-4, and against Bill Clinton it was 258-176. The political outcomes are well known. When Republicans allowed their animus against Bill Clinton to override their political instincts, they suffered, the Clintons did not.
Surely Speaker Pelosi knows (or should she be told), that there are not 67 votes in the Senate to convict President Trump of anything relating to his phone call with President Zelensky. Hence it is just political theater.
The issue is that as it plays out over the next year, everyone will get the joke. The House is going through the motions to stoke its own base before the elections, just as Newt Gingrich did in 1998. This in turn will energize the Republicans to rally behind their leader.
The danger on the Democrats’ side is that they will demoralize their most loyal voters when they realize the joke is on them. There will be no resignation, and no conviction in the Senate. There will however be an election. By focusing on their obsession with Donald Trump Democrats are relinquishing the opportunity to talk about concerns such as wages, employment, the shrinking middle-class or any of the issues that motivate voters.
After two-and-a-half years of hearing about Russia, Russia, Russia, there are very few swing voters who want to spend the next 14 months hearing about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. The present political problem is just more psychodrama on the Washington stage in the Democratic Theatre of the Absurd.
However, as engaging as it may be for those deeply involved in politics, for the journalists and the media, who cover it, and for the people who are deeply ideological, is totally irrelevant and unappealing to many voters who just simply and rightly want to know what Washington is going to do for them.
Meanwhile back to reality. Everyone knows that Speaker Pelosi’s relentless pursuance of impeachment will not result in a conviction in the Senate, and the removal of the President from office. So it is hard to look at this move as anything other than an act of desperation — an affirmation that there is no Democratic candidate likely to beat Donald Trump head-to-head on issues such as China’s mercantilist trade policies, stagnating wages, the shrinking middle class, and immigration.
Sad, but true, the Democrats by choosing impeachment are choosing the ground on which they want to fight the election. Shaky ground to say the least, and above all, it imperils their front-runner, and avoids the very issue that motivates voters in must-win states.
That does not sound like winning to me. Sounds like an in-kind donation to Trump’s campaign. The Democrats are playing with fire but it will not be Trump who gets burnt.
Yvonne Sam, a retired Head Nurse and Secondary School Teacher, is Vice-president of the Guyana Cultural Association of Montreal. A regular columnist for over two decades with the Montreal Community Contact, her insightful and incursive articles on topics ranging from politics, human rights and immigration, to education and parenting have also appeared in the Huffington Post, Montreal Gazette, XPressbogg and Guyanese OnLine. She is also the recipient of the Governor General of Canada Caring Canadian Citizen Award.
