Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-When all is said and done on Election Day 2018, the anti-Trump movement and each of its subsets will likely wake up on Wednesday with two sobering realizations.
- The removal of President Donald Trump from office is even less likely, if not utterly impossible.
For nearly two years, dating back to the first weekend of protests after Trump’s election, the media and professional Left (as opposed to commoners who identify as liberal or progressive) have fed us a steady diet of “resist” and “impeach,” without people genuinely understanding how impeachment works, let alone the fact that an impeachment is nothing more than (a serious) accusation. Without a trial and conviction, it is a largely political move. Only Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached, but both were acquitted in the Senate. Lay the public’s general lack of understanding about this squarely at the feet of the public school system.
An impeachment, which will be impossible without strong proof of criminal behavior from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is made by the House of Representatives, aka the lower chamber of Congress. It goes nowhere without a subsequent trial and conviction in the U.S. Senate, aka the upper chamber. With a nearly concrete certainty, the U.S. Senate is about to become more Republican, not less. And that’s where an already unlikely impeachment will die.
And that didn’t have to be.
While the Democrats need 24 Republican or vacant seats in the House of Representatives to take back its control there, they only needed to win 2 seats in the Senate. But just a few weeks ago, several vulnerable Democrat Senators up for re-election on Tuesday in red states voted against Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, despite a lack of corroborating evidence in the sexual misconduct saga. As a result, it is more likely than not that come Wednesday, those Senate seats in Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and elsewhere will be filled by Republicans. And in West Virginia, where Democrat Senator Joe Manchin’s party affiliation is always dubious, his tepid and belated vote in support of Kavanaugh may hand-deliver his seat to Republicans.
And with that growing Republican control of the Senate, impeachment is dead on arrival. But that’s not all.
- The federal courts are about to become much more conservative.
While the media has banged the drum daily of the likely changing of the guard in the House of Representatives from red to blue, it’s the soon-to-be redder Senate that approves federal judges to the 673 positions on district courts, 179 on courts of appeals and the 9 Supreme Court positions.
The Senate is already fast-tracking Trump’s conservative federal judge nominees to life-long appointments that require misconduct, impeachment and Senate conviction for removal. Look for that pace of their appointments to increase shortly after Tuesday. Trump, who picked particularly young SCOTUS nominees in Neil Gorsuch, who just turned 51, and Kavanaugh, 53, will have his fingerprints on the federal courts for decades after he leaves office and even beyond his lifetime.
It will certainly be a big deal if the Democrats wind up taking back control of the House of Representatives. But it isn’t the be-all, end-all that many people think. It won’t come close to removing Trump from office, and it can’t do a thing to prevent him from re-making the federal bench into a much more conservative outlet. While the Dems have promised many forms of retaliation against Trump, they had better deliver something more than showboating. They run the risk of over-promising and under-delivering against Trump’s roaring economy. That could be strong enough to keep him in office for another term, assuming he seeks it. If he doesn’t, the Dems’ lift in 2020 will get a lot heavier if they have to run against Vice President Mike Pence, whose conservative fingerprint will make Trump’s seem like child’s play.
And I don’t think this potential long-term reality is fully appreciated by those going into Tuesday with short-sighted expectations and impeachment delirium.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Join his mailing list or offer verifiable tips and story ideas at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
Tags: Daniel Guss, @The Guss Report, impeachment, SCOTUS, Election Day 2018, federal court appointments, Donald Trump
