More than 2/3 of Democrats think that the impeachment process should begin. I think they’re right: I think they understand the situation with Trump — the stakes and what’s necessary to prevail — better than the Democratic leadership in the House.
(A leadership that sees more dangers than opportunities in a course of action that’s actually supposed to be mandatory, not optional.)
This is too important an issue — perhaps the most important political crisis the nation has faced since the Civil War — on which it is OK for Democratic leadership to fail.
At the very least we know that on this crucial issue, which falls to the House of Representatives, the House Democratic leadership has been frustrating the heartfelt desires of more than 2/3 of the nation’s Democrats.
(This has been leading to the discouragement the passionate Democratic base that brought this Speaker and her Democratic majority to power — a damping of passions that cannot help but prove politically costly.)
The failure of the House leadership to express the feelings of the majority of Democrats creates an opportunity for new leadership to arise.
(Good politics for potential Democratic leaders, as well as meeting the needs of the nation.)
Where might we look to for such new leadership– the kind we need to deal more successfully with this fraught and hugely important battle?
Two places:
1) The candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President should pick up the ball that has been fumbled in the House and run with it toward the nomination and toward moving public opinion where it should go. And
2) The Democratic Senators who see the need for impeachment — presumably in some proportion like the rank-and-file Democrats — and who presumably feel freer than House Democrats to challenge publicly the course that Pelosi has taken — should speak up in ways best designed to move things in the House and in the nation.
I will be writing about each of those possible sources of the Democratic leadership we need to deal rightly on this historically profoundly important issue.
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