Les Folies Impéchements: House Dems Think Third Time's the Charm?

Old and busted: If at first you don't succeed, try try again. New hotness: If at twice you have succeeded and you're still stuck with your bete noire ... maybe it's time to examine your strategy.

Don't expect "resistance-minded House Democrats, as Axios calls them, to learn anything from history. As the odds of a Democrat midterm victory in the lower chamber increase, the progressives in the caucus have begun agitating for – what else? – the impeachment of Donald Trump. For the third time. After voters emphatically returned him to office.

What could go wrong? We'll apparently find out on Day One of the next session of Congress if the lunatics end up running the asylum:

Why it matters: The mere existence of this movement demonstrates just how much pressure lawmakers who have not yet gotten on board with impeachment will face in January of 2027.

• "This is something that I keep saying to our leadership ... we need to have a very concrete, coordinated strategy," Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) told Axios.
• The Illinois Democrat said the party should "build up the case so that when we are in power in January, we've created the conditions ... we've done the fact-checking, we've done the shadow hearings, everything we need to be able to to impeach [Trump]."
• Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) told Axios that if Democrats recapture the House "the push for impeachment is going to be overwhelming."

Okay. And then ... what, exactly? This plan looks suspiciously like the business plan of the underpants gnomes in South Park:

House radicals keep skipping the explanation of Phase 2 in their genius plan to impeach Trump for the third time. They're not even explaining Phase 3 all that well, either. What profit do they expect to take from a third impeachment? Democrats impeached Trump twice in his first term, and both times, the Senate refused to remove him from office. Nancy Pelosi et al fulminated for years that the impeachments left a stain of disgrace on Trump's term nonetheless, and may have contributed to his narrow loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

How sustained was that "disgrace"? Four years later, Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College against the darling of the Democrat Left, Kamala Harris. Voters rejected the impeachments, as well as the January 6 hysteria, to return to more common-sense economic and border policies. 

It turned out that the only people who cared about impeachment stunts are progressive agitators with less strategic insight than underpants gnomes. 

Let's play this all the way out, though. If Democrats get a significant enough majority in the midterms, they could probably impeach Trump for a third time. But even if Democrats win a majority in the Senate, it will be well short of the 67 votes needed for removal. All that means is that Trump will have racked up yet another partisan censure without any legal force at all, and this time it won't have any electoral impact at all. Trump's not running for office again after his term ends. Democrats will have diluted impeachment for no reason at all.

Even if Trump got removed – which is a nonsense hypothetical – progressives will have elevated J.D. Vance to the presidency in advance of his likely primary run for 2028. That would likely unite the GOP around a nominee while Democrat kneebiters slog it out in a tough primary for a year-plus. Vance would continue the same policies as Trump, and the lawfare would once again turn off voters, not to mention the radical turn the Democrat Party keeps taking despite all of the warning signs from voters. 

And yet, here we go again. Vive la résistance, or something. Sacre blecch.

What seems very clear from all of this is that House progressives don't actually have a policy platform, other than Orange Man Bad. At least, they don't have a policy platform that they are willing to sell honestly to the American electorate. They want to seize power and impose socialism in a shell game that relies on making people hysterical about Trump's mere presence. In that, they have succeeded with a significant chunk of weak-minded voters who mainly get featured in videos from street protests, some of them for violent acts. But it's never been a winning strategy, and the third time is not likely to charm anyone except those already inside the hard-Left cults. 

Note: I don't think the French for impeachment is really impéchement, but it sure looks good in the headline.