Again, they know this. As Michigan representative Debbie Dingell says: "I think there are pragmatic people that know [impeachment] is not going to take us anywhere." Indeed, per the New York Times, "The majority of the Democratic caucus ... sees [impeachment] as a politically perilous push that would lead to an almost certain acquittal in the Senate and further drain attention from its legislative work." Ya think?
Donald Trump will be removed from office one way: by an election. The Democrats have to stop imagining they can substitute litigation for politics. In the next fifteen months, they have to drop the irrelevant litigation strategy and wage the political fight they've been avoiding for the past twenty-one months, or they'll be watching Donald Trump's second inauguration for another four-year term.
The problem, of course, and one of the horrors of the American polity, is that the political entity (can't really call it a "movement") that's assembled around the Democratic party does not want, or know how, to do this.
2) Impeaching Donald Trump will make things worse.
Two words: Mike Pence.
As far as I'm concerned, for any progressive politics, Mike Pence is a dispositive argument against impeachment.
If the Democrats were somehow successful in removing Trump, they would have installed a president who is a much more serious, organized, and ideologically-coherent religious proto-fascist. The major difference is that he will not be so stupid as to waste his time on provocative tweets. There is not the slightest reason to think any policy of a Pence presidency would be any better, and many reasons to think all would be worse. There is simply no progressive political point to clearing the way for Mike Pence to become Commander-in-Chief.
Impeachment is a political act, not a legal trial or a test of moral virtue. As Gerald Ford famously and correctly said: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history."
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