I am confident that any bill of impeachment passed by the House will not only fail in the Senate – it will never go to trial in the Senate. Senate boss McConnell has shown that he is perfectly willing to simply ignore House-passed bills, so they never get a hearing, never get a vote, never get officially introduced for Senate action.
With that in mind, I believe that an impeachment process in the House must never end … that is, it must not be passed, or even voted on, in the House or in the Judiciary Committee. Individual articles of impeachment may be, but the bill itself should never be reported out of the Judiciary Committee or brought to the floor of the House.
Why? Because once impeachment is passed in the House, it is dead.
The House will have no further action to take and no further hearings or investigations to hold. And the Senate (McConnell) will simply put it in a drawer and ignore it.
Given that assumption – that passing an impeachment bill in the House effectively ends the impeachment process – what should the House Democrats do?
There are many actions the House can take – some of them must be taken. Many do not involve Trump at all, at least not directly. The key is that this is a corrupt administration and a corrupt Republican Party from top to bottom and that Republican corruption must be top-of-mind when voters get to the polls in November 2020.
The House Democrats should conduct a wide range of investigations into criminal activities by Republicans, by Trump, by Trump’s family members, by Trump’s businesses, and by Trump administration officials. The goal is not necessarily impeachment – the goal is to expose the depth and breadth of corruption and to keep that corruption in the public eye.
Every day from now until the last vote is counted, the lead story should be another piece of evidence uncovered, testimony given, indictment issued, guilty plea entered, and sentence pronounced. Every. Day.
This daily pronouncement should take the headlines away from Trump’s twitter feed.
I would start with charges against Barr. Then move against the rest of Trump’s wall – Mnuchin, Kushner and his wife, the IRS commissioner, all those who are ignoring the subpoenas, Lindsay Graham and the rest of the Congressional guards, McConnell, and more. But also the officers of Trump’s business.
All of these would be added to the findings of Mueller’s team. Further investigations into Mueller’s findings are also needed because parts of the report and all of the underlying evidence are hidden from Congress, forcing Congress to conduct its own investigation in order to produce the evidence.
As I said at the start – if an impeachment bill passes in the House, the impeachment process will be over, the investigations will end, and Trump will remain safely in the White House. There are 19 months until the Senate can pass out of Republican hands and all 19 months should be filled with stories of Republican corruption.
