Guess who’s Nancy Pelosi’s president until at least January 20, 2021?
Despite the best effort of the angry House Speaker, her angry deputies Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, and her angry party cohort in the Senate, Pelosi’s president will be Donald John Trump.
Now that the Senate has acquitted Trump on both articles of impeachment, neither of which were supported by the evidence, the question is how much damage the Democrat party’s radical chieftains did to red-state Democrats such as Senator Doug Jones in Alabama, or House members in toss-up races.
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The party-line vote to acquit Trump (with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney’s vote on one of the articles) was no surprise, blaring headlines regardless. The Democrat coup attempt was doomed before Schiff opened the show trial in the House weeks ago.
Romney Bails
Trump faced two articles of impeachment: one for abuse of power because he properly asked the president of Ukraine to probe the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme, and another for “obstruction” because he asserted executive privilege and refused to release documents the House lynch mob sought with subpoenas.
In the first case, Democrats suggested that Trump committed an impeachable offense because in asking Ukraine to probe the Bidens, he solicited “foreign interference” in the 2020 election because former Vice President Joe Biden is running for president. In the second, Democrats suggested that a president is not entitled to mount a legal argument against a subpoena, a dangerous claim.
They lost on both counts. On article 1, the vote was 52-48 to acquit; on the second, it was 53-47.
Utah’s chameleon Mitt Romney, who tried to out-Kennedy Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts on the abortion issue in 1994 when he ran against him for Senate, abandoned Trump on article one after delivering a heart-rending speech that brought Democrats to tears.
It was an anti-climactic end to the Democrats’ 39-month kicking, screaming tantrum following Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in 2016.
Democrats, recall, began discussing impeachment before Trump had the GOP nomination.
Red-State, Red-District Democrats Harmed?
What Pelosi and her gang in the House don’t know is how the failed attempt to overturn the result of a fair election will affect red-state Democrats.
A key loser might be Jones. In 2017, he won a special election against Republican Roy Moore by a margin of 50 percent to 48 after a last-minute smear campaign against the conservative judge.
But now Jones might well face former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a hard-nosed conservative senator before Trump picked him to run the Justice Department. Jones’s vote with the Democrat coup plotters won’t help his chances.
And as the tally at 270ToWin.com shows, the imprudent move to oust a popular president might well have harmed the re-election chances of congressmen in pro-Trump districts in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New York, and elsewhere. In Minnesota 7, for instance, Democrat Collin Peterson won his race 52.1 percent to 47.9. But Trump crushed Clinton there, 61.8 to 31.
Maine 2’s Jared Golden might have a tougher time, too. He won his race by just 1 percent. But his district went for Trump by about 10 percent.
Two Bad Days
The unsurprising defeat of the Democrat coup attempt is one of a three of self-inflicted wounds in the last two days.
Last night, it was Democrats behaving badly as Trump delivered his State of the Union. They refused to applaud, for instance, when Trump awarded a scholarship to a little black girl in the gallery.
“Another stunning but unsurprising moment from Democrats during the #SOTU,” tweeted Steve Guest of the Republican National Committee. “Democrats remain seated as President Trump awards an “opportunity scholarship” to 4th grader.”
Then, in yet another embarrassment to the party, as Democrats on Capitol Hill were losing Wednesday’s vote to reverse the results of November 8, 2016, Democrats in Iowa were arguing over which candidate won Tuesday’s caucuses: Pete Buttigieg, a homosexual who thinks he’s “married” to a man, or Bernie Sanders, a communist apologist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and employs communist campaign workers who want to burn down cities and guillotine the rich.
After Trump’s masterful SOTU, an angry, petulant Pelosi dramatically tore up her copy of the speech.
Now, Trump can tear up the articles of impeachment.
Photo of Rep. Steny Hoyer (left), Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Chuck Schumer: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
