This Thanksgiving, Americans can be grateful for the demise of the Democrats’ impeachment push. Regardless of politics, we should all be able to acknowledge that the country will be better off without a divisive crusade to remove the president from office in an election year.
House Democrats laid their cards on the table with a series of highly-publicized hearings that they were confident would establish a clear case for impeachment. Instead, the hearings produced the opposite effect — the more the American people saw, the less credence they put in the allegations against President Trump.
An Emerson poll revealed that trend in approval ratings, but found an even more dramatic shift in opinions of the impeachment proceedings, with a complete reversal among independent voters. In October, independent voters supported impeachment by a 48 percent to 39 percent margin. Now, 49 percent of independent voters say they oppose impeachment, compared to just 34 percent who still support the effort. (RELATED: Democrats May Have Buyer’s Remorse After Month Of Impeachment Hearings)
These results shouldn’t surprise anyone who paid attention to the public impeachment hearings, which revealed little more than the fact that a handful of career bureaucrats are resentful of President Trump’s handling of foreign policy. The witnesses uniformly failed to substantiate the Democrats’ “quid pro quo” claims, offering only their own self-serving opinions and inferences. It was so bad that the Democrats had to revise their talking points after consulting with a focus group, switching from “quid pro quo” to “bribery” in hopes that the new charge would sound more plausible.
Despite a steady drumbeat of mainstream media headlines touting supposed “bombshell” testimony, not to mention the repeated assurances from Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that their case was all but closed, the American people weren’t fooled. Their bombshells were duds! The polls make it abundantly clear that voters are not interested in a party-line impeachment vote that would drag this circus out for months until President Trump’s inevitable acquittal in the Senate.
Fortunately, cracks are starting to appear in the unified facade put on by congressional Democrats. Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan recently became the first Democrat to reverse positions on impeachment, saying she no longer sees any “value” in the effort, and would prefer censure resolution that would allow Congress to get back to the business of governing. (RELATED: Democrats Are Scrambling To Find A Backup Plan After Impeachment Hearings)
“We are so close to an election,” Lawrence noted in a radio interview, adding, “I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of taking him out of office.”
Notably, Lawrence represents a solidly-blue district in the Detroit area, so she’s not just blowing with the winds of public opinion. If anything, she’s demonstrating substantial political courage by giving her Democrat voters the unwelcome news that the Party’s latest attempt to remove the president from office is at the precipice of failure.
Good for her. Pelosi herself declared in March that impeachment is “so divisive” that “it’s just not worth it” to proceed without an “overwhelming and bipartisan” consensus. Lawrence is just applying the same reasoning — House Democrats failed to persuade their Republican colleagues to support impeachment, guaranteeing that any effort to remove the president from office would only exacerbate partisan tensions and distract Congress from more pressing matters. (RELATED: House Democrats Violate The 6th Amendment By Denying Trump A Public Trial)
As Americans reflect on all the things we’re grateful for this Thanksgiving, the collapse of the Democrats’ impeachment crusade should certainly merit inclusion in that list. Not even Thanksgiving can make the “turkey” of the Democrats’ crusade against the president anything but a dry, dead bird.
Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) served as the 44th governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He is currently the host of “Huckabee” on TBN.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.