Here’s an inconvenient truth:
To remove Trump, the House must impeach by a simple majority and the Senate must confirm by a vote of 2/3. That’s 67 votes needed in the Senate. Democrats control 47 seats. That means to dump Trump, we need at least 20 Republican Senators to join the vote.
20 Republicans.
That ain’t gonna happen today.
It took over a year for Republicans voters to turn against Nixon once the scandal really took off in the public’s mind. It is unclear how closely we can analogize Watergate with the present. Still, I think the Helsinki meeting last July was an inflection point. Regardless, Watergate demonstrates a political truism: for plainly partisan reasons alone, a party protects its president until it is beyond a reasonable doubt that the president is a crook Russian asset and must go. Even when the facts are known and plain, for many people it takes time for those facts to sink in. All the more so when they are the kind of facts that those many people don’t really want to hear. It will happen, of course, as the inexorable drip drip drip of damning facts continues, and the general picture of a corrupt, conspiring and treasonous Trump presidency emerges.
This week may seem like quite a doozy, but I think upon reflection of all the dirty crap we suspect and think Trump has and is pulling, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
And so, I think it politically most astute for our party to appear at the center of American politics. That is, stay with the facts, ride the impeachment wave.
As for us, well, they don’t call it “the activist base” for nothing….