One thing which is immediately clear, in listening to the impeachment debate yesterday, is that it’s a House divided, and there is essentially no common ground between the parties.
Democrats believe that Trump abused his power, and that it’s a Constitutional crisis.
Republicans believe that it’s a partisan sham, and that Trump did nothing wrong.
These are two completely separate narratives that share nothing in common; it seems obvious that there will be no way to square the circle. People on both sides of this issue are not going to come to agreement.
I do think that it is interesting, however, that Republicans are emphasizing so much that this is a partisan process. How did it become partisan? Well let us count the ways:
- President Trump won what I have previously described as a “fuck you” election. It’s pretty obvious now (and it was already obvious then) that what his supporters loved most about the guy was that he was going to stick it to us libtards.
- Since the election, President Trump has gone about pandering to his base and ignoring everyone who didn’t vote for him (thereby becoming the first President in modern history to employ this strategy). Almost every other President went in the other direction.
- Fearing Trump’s tweets and the base that voted for him, almost every Republican has lined up behind Trump since the election. The only exception have been those Republicans (like Jeff Flake, for example) who decided to throw in the towel and not run for re-election.
- While still campaigning, Trump was already asking other governments to interfere in our election, especially when he went on TV and publicly asked the Russians to invade Hillary Clinton’s email server. Which they did, only a day later.
- Trump began to obstruct justice early on in his tenure when in May of 2017 he fired FBI Director James Comey for not being willing to go announce publicly that Trump was not a target of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
So basically, Trump has made this a completely partisan affair from the very beginning of his Presidency.
In the meantime, Moscow Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republican Majority in the Senate, has made that chamber as partisan as possible, by ramming as many judges as possible — and especially Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court — through the confirmation process while the Senate is still in Republican hands. (That may, of course, change in 2020.)
The (redacted) Mueller report was subsequently released to the public on April 18, 2019, which included ten examples of the ways that the Trump administration had obstructed justice, along with Mueller’s conclusion that a sitting President could not be indicted because of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion from the Department of Justice.
He then practically begged the Congress to impeach Trump.
People who have been paying attention to the process also know that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not a fan of impeaching Trump, wary of the political repercussions that the impeachment of Bill Clinton back in 1999 wrought in the political landscape.
But sure, the Democrats are responsible for today’s hyper-partisan landscape.