Impeachment is a Chess, Not a Checkers Game

People who believe that impeachment is not worth doing because it will fail in the Senate are thinking checkers. But this is a chess game. It's not about removing Trump from office. It's about having access to the full power of impeachment hearings to investigate Trump.

The way I think about impeachment is the way I think about life-- it's the road, not the destination. Once the impeachment process is started, the revelations about Trump's corruption and criminality will start to emerge. The idea should be to keep the impeachment going as long as possible, with new testimonies and new releases of disclosures of corruption and treason on a regular basis.

Looking at impeachment as a process for removing the president is a top-down way of thinking about it. Looking at it as a key that gives access to investigative tools is the smarter, more strategic, bottom-up way of looking at it.

Ideally, it will get so bad for Trump that the Republicans will end up putting up someone else to run in the general election. They'll have to do it on relatively short notice. If that happens, it will totally neutralize Joe Biden's campaign. It will neutralize the DNC's main narrative. The candidates who focus on Trump will be neutralizes. The candidates who bring issues to the table will be the ones with the best chance of winning.

If Trump stays as the Republican candidate, the impeachment will damage him and persuade some of the people who voted for him not so much because they were voting for Trump as because they voted against Hillary. I think there are plenty of those people. Of course if the Democratic leadership goes top-down again and rigs the election, for example, through the influence of superdelegates, then they may not be able to convert the anti-Hillary voters to come back to the Democratic party.

Perhaps Pelosi is keeping impeachment off the table because she knows that it could end up producing a different candidate to run against instead of Trump. But Pelosi has a terrible history. With Hillary, Pelosi decided that Trump was the candidate that Hillary SHOULD run against. That didn't turn out as planned.

The 2020 presidential election is in the hands of the Democratic leadership. They can win or lose it. They have a bad history. Perhaps they should trust in the people and let go of their top-down control addiction. Bernie Sanders has said that change happens from the bottom-up. Election success does too.