Geez, how many republican senators are there? Go ahead, check, I’ll wait… Right it would take TWENTY of them to vote to convict trump. By what astonishing mechanism will this occur? * Now, once the hearing is held in the House, the senate will vote “Not Guilty” and then Fox news and trump will loudly proclaim he has been proven to be* Not Guilty.** Every political expert knows this.
1st- the hearings and investigations have up until now gone largely unnoticed and didnt seem to hurt trump:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-if-house-held-impeachment-proceedings-and-nobody-noticed
*Responding to CNN’s Erin Burnett, he declared forcefully that his committee’s current program “is formal impeachment proceedings.” Later the same night, with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, he said, “We’ve made it clear that the committee is holding an investigation.… [W]e are considering what to do about it, including the possible voting of articles of impeachment.”
The nation barely noticed. Between a string of mass shootings, the ongoing Democratic presidential primary and a shuffle of senior intelligence leaders, even political junkies seemed to take little notice of the news that the House of Representatives has begun officially and publicly moving forward with investigations to invoke its solemn, constitutionally ordained “sole power” to impeach the president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the age of Trump, it seems, not even the beginning of impeachment proceedings offers a national moral inflection point…
On the political side, the main reason offered by Pelosi and political pundits alike for not pursuing impeachment efforts has been the belief that initiating such formal proceedings without a clear path to conviction and removal by the Senate would damage Democrats at the polls in 2020. …Nevertheless, through the spring and even after the Mueller report’s release, polls showed no majority in favor of impeachment, suggesting to Pelosi and others that moving forward on formal investigations of the president with a mind to that constitutional remedy would bring a backlash from the public. *
*But he added “I think we should not kid ourselves. Under no circumstances will [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell ever allow impeachment to go forward. Democrats have to realize that if we ever want to beat Donald Trump, we have to do it at the ballot box.”
Hickenlooper held out hope that “when we do the inquiry and have the subpoenas and get the real facts, somehow there might be a way that those facts take us towards impeachment.”
But he added that “it would have to be extraordinary and almost unimaginable for Mitch McConnell to let it get through.”
And Hickenlooper highlighted that with McConnell – an ally of the president – controlling the Senate, impeachment “would become a vehicle to help” Trump. The impeachment bid on the House floor Wednesday is expected to fail.*
The other side’s position: “Impeachment will fail to remove Trump, so it’s pointless, and it also could hurt Democrats politically.”
and also- the voters dont want it:
A late June Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 37 percent of US adults supported beginning impeachment proceedings while 59 percent opposed it. (Political independents opposed impeachment proceedings by nearly a two-to-one margin.)
*3) A Senate trial: If impeachment articles do manage to pass through the House, the next stop is a trial before the Republican-controlled Senate. The details of how that would play out aren’t yet clear. Would Mitch McConnell even hold the trial, or just ignore it like he did Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination? Would he hold the trial but turn it into a farce?
- The Senate acquits: Should a trial happen, though, the ultimate outcome seems clear. It takes a two-thirds Senate majority to convict an impeached president and remove him from office. Since there are only 47 Senate Democrats, that means 20 Republican senators would have to vote to oust the president who remains overwhelmingly popular among their party’s voters.
Unless some opinion-shaking bombshell unlike anything we’ve yet seen in Trump’s presidency is found, this will not happen. So at the end of the road is defeat and disappointment for Democrats, and Trump still in office.
Whether Trump and his 2020 reelection effort would be helped or hurt by the whole months-long spectacle isn’t clear. (The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton’s impeachment and acquittal was bad for Republicans. …
Still, looking at this whole likely sequence of events, it’s evident why Democratic leaders don’t want to go down this road — it doesn’t end anywhere good, and the politicians put in the toughest spots are House Democrats in districts Trump won.*