The Democrats are handing over the House in gift wrapping with their impeachment push, high-ranking White House official Marc Short said during an interview on the Breitbart News Sunday satellite radio program.
Short, who serves as chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, added that Democrats are making a mistake by betting the farm on removing Trump from office instead of working to get things done for American voters. Short explained that Pence is seeking to persuade voters in competitive districts that Democrats hate Trump more than they care about them.
Short: Dems are failing constituents
The Democrats retook the majority in the midterm elections with an agenda that focused on health care and other issues. But Democrats have since abandoned their commitment to focusing on legislative agenda items in favor of ousting Trump by any means necessary, Short said.
Pence’s top aide added that the VP has been emphasizing that the Democrats’ impeachment obsession is working to the detriment of policy matters like the U.S. Mexico-Canada trade agreement and has been doing so in Democratic districts that Trump won in 2016, where issues like trade and agriculture resonate heavily. Democrats hold 31 seats that Trump carried in 2016, but to retake the House, Republicans must win only 19.
“I think that as we highlight what the Democrats are doing, we need to spend at least as much time highlighting what they’re not doing, because when they went to the voters in the midterm elections as you said they made a lot of promises,” Short said. ”They said they’d promise to fix drug pricing and to fix the healthcare system and to bring down healthcare costs—they even said they would fix immigration. They said they would fix infrastructure. They made a lot of promises….One of the talking points I hear out of Congressional Republicans is to say that these Democrats have issued more subpoenas than bills they’ve passed. It’s a good point.”
Short observed that two Democrats bucked the party line by voting against the impeachment rules vote last week, which all Republicans opposed. One of those two Democrats, Rep. Colin Peterson (D-MN), is from a rural district that Trump carried. The Pence staffer said that the solidarity shown by the GOP is not a good sign for Democrats.
“The reality is, we know that the leader of this committee, Adam Schiff, has lied to the American people not just in the fake transcript that he read but also when he said there had been no contact between his office and the whistleblower, but then we find out they actually coached the whistleblower on how to present a case. So, there is enormous concern about the process, and I think that’s what kept Republicans together.”
Risky bet
Democrats have talked up the possibility of Pence’s removal from office or his resignation, setting the stage for an unprecedented scenario in which Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) would rise to the Oval Office. Putting such media fantasies aside, the more likely projection is that Trump will be impeached by Democrats in the House, then acquitted by Republicans in the Senate.
Despite the prophecies of doom issuing from the anti-Trump media, Republican lawmakers are susceptible to pressure from the majority of Republican voters who support President Trump against impeachment, and at any rate, public opinion on impeachment is fluid. A new poll claims that almost half of Americans support Trump’s removal from office, but the impeachment is nevertheless hugely divisive, not backed by a clear majority of voters, and liable to embolden Republicans in support of the president.
Evidently, Democrats are hoping to turn public opinion against Trump by providing their impeachment “inquiry” a patina of legitimacy, with a tokenized vote to establish “rules” and public hearings down the road to tell a story of the president’s corruption through television. But unless the Democrats can sell their case to the American people that Trump should be impeached over a phone call, they will only have divided the country further while setting themselves up for a backlash in 2020.
“In terms of the next phase of this, I think you’ll see Republicans hold together actually on the evidence, because the reality is the president, as far as any sort of coverup, the president provided the transcript open to all the American people to read for themselves to recognize that there was no quid pro quo, and the reality was that the funding that Congress appropriated was given to Ukraine,” Short said.
It might be time for Democrats to rein in their fantasies of “President Pelosi” and reckon with the coming consequences of their single-minded focus on obstructing the president.
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