Congress has taken a significant new step toward impeaching President Trump, and Democratic leaders appear committed, if resignedly so, to the course of action the #Resistance base has demanded since Inauguration Day. Casting that die is a gamble, because it is by no means clear that the Senate would ever vote to remove a sitting Republican president.
But what if getting rid of Trump isn’t the primary goal of congressional leadership?
It is odd that calls for impeachment have reached a crescendo now, over reports of a phone conversation Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump is alleged to have asked Zelensky to investigate demands that then-Vice President Joe Biden made for the termination of a prosecutor who was examining an energy company that his son, Hunter, worked for. Biden is alleged to have demanded that the prosecutor be fired or Ukraine would lose anticipated American assistance.
Democrats claim that Trump used state power for political ends, to injure candidate Biden’s chances in the 2020 election. This is a serious charge, but it is substantively no different from Trump’s claims that the Obama administration used state power to investigate his campaign in 2016 over now-discredited claims that it was “colluding” with Russia. Plus, it isn’t clear who other than the US president would be able to follow up allegations of an ex-vice president’s abuse of power.
It is certain that an investigation into Trump’s conversation with Zelensky will injure Joe Biden, as all the facts and details of his son’s work with Burisma Holdings come to light. Hunter Biden is, by his own admission to The New Yorker, a serially relapsed alcoholic and cocaine addict who habitually bought drugs from Los Angeles street dealers and invited a homeless woman to live with him, while his father was vice president. His entire career as a lobbyist and corporate board officer appears to be largely predicated on his filial proximity to Joe Biden. Hunter, in short, is an issue for his father’s campaign.
Joe Biden already has enough problems — gaffes, prosthodontic mishaps, a tendency to ramble — yet he is still the frontrunner in the Democratic nomination race. The next six months promise to be bloody and expensive for the Democrats, as Biden and Elizabeth Warren pummel each other, leading to an ugly August convention in Milwaukee. From the perspective of party leadership, the best thing would be for Biden — whom senior Democrats believe to be a disaster-in-waiting — to get out of the way, as early as possible, to establish the appearance of a united front against Trump.
Opening an investigation — nominally against Trump — into Joe Biden’s strong-arming of the Ukrainian government on behalf of his influence-peddling son serves two key purposes for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee. It mollifies the agitated Left that demands impeachment at all costs, whether it succeeds or not, and it will force Joe Biden to exit the race sooner than later.
Otherwise, the call for an impeachment inquiry at this point makes no sense. No one in Congress had even seen the transcript at the time the call was made. We just endured a two-year federal investigation into every detail of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, with ambiguous results, and that wasn’t enough to convince the Democrats to impeach him. But a secondhand report of a diplomatic conversation was enough to spark a national crisis and remove the chief executive?
Dems’ main target in this inquiry is their own frontrunner, who poses too many risks for the national party to be the nominee yet who is beloved by many of their voters. If their drive to remove Biden also happens to hurt Trump, well, they’ll call that a freebie.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post