Fox News reports that House Democrats voted on Thursday to make their impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump official. To some, this may seem like a win: Democrats wanted impeachment, and now they’ve got it. But one Republican commentator says the vote may not be the victory Dems have been hoping for.
According to Newt Gingrich, “the Halloween vote for impeachment was an enormous strategic defeat for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” And in an op-ed for Fox News on Saturday, the former House speaker explained why.
A terrible failure
In an interview with The Washington Post in March, Pelosi admitted that she wasn’t “for impeachment,” according to Gingrich — and for good reason.
“I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this, impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country,” Pelosi told the Post. “And he’s just not worth it.”
By that standard, Gingrich wrote Saturday, “the Thursday vote was a terrible failure.”
Indeed, despite Pelosi’s insistence that impeachment should only come from “something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan,” her inquiry so far has been anything but bipartisan.
“The House voted in an entirely partisan manner except for two Democrats who split to vote no with the Republicans,” Gingrich wrote in his op-ed. “Months of leaks, secret investigations, news media hysteria, and a parade of witnesses failed to move a single Republican to vote yes.”
An enormous defeat
This, Gingrich says, stands in stark contrast to the last impeachment vote, which came against former President Bill Clinton in 1998, when Gingrich was House speaker. At the time, “31 Democrats joined all Republicans in setting up a formal process for considering impeachment,” according to The Washington Post, creating what Gingrich called “a bipartisan 257–176 majority for moving forward with impeachment.”
“By contrast not only did no Republicans vote for the Pelosi impeachment, but she also lost two Democrats despite enormous pressure within the caucus,” Gingrich wrote. Moreover, he says, Pelosi doesn’t have the support of the American people that he had.
“Just on Thursday Ron Faucheux reported on a Suffolk University/USA Today poll (October 23-26) that asserted only 36[%] favored impeaching President Trump,” Gingrich noted. And even after “seven months with total control of the investigative machinery,” Pelosi came up short in finding “adequate information to convince the vast majority of Americans that impeachment was necessary,” he added.
Now, Gingrich says, Democrats will have to face the reality of what they’ve done.
“[T]he vote on Halloween was a terrible defeat which is likely to haunt the House Democrats through the 2020 election,” he concluded. “When combined with the radicalism of the national Democratic candidates for president, and the continued economic growth under President Trump’s policies, it is likely that Thursday’s vote guaranteed this would be a one-term Democratic majority, and we will be hearing from Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2021.”
We can only hope.
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