As impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee came to a close, Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) worked with staffers to compile a report on the panel’s findings. Now, he’s giving committee members just 24 hours to read and sign off on it, Breitbart reports.
Democrats on the panel are expected to approve the report Tuesday, pushing it through along party lines. Once approved, the report will be sent off to the House Judiciary Committee, which will then decide whether to draft formal articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
Hearings are set to begin in the Judiciary panel on Wednesday, according to Breitbart.
Bad timing?
Schiff’s short timeline may seem like a strange move, but in a piece published last week, Washington Examiner columnist Byron York argued that Democrats are acting out of a need to beat “two very political deadlines.” The first: the onset of the presidential primaries.
“Instead of campaigning,” York explains, Democrat White House hopefuls like Sens. Bernie Sanders (VT) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) “will be chained to their desks in the Senate chamber in Washington for the duration of a Senate impeachment trial. That’s not the best way for a candidate to spend the weeks leading up to caucuses and primaries,” York contends.
Moreover, according to the columnist, the American public is simply getting tired of the so-called “Schiff Show.”
“Some recent polls have shown public support for impeachment leveling off and even tipping downward,” York wrote. “The public has already been through years of the Trump–Russia investigation, culminating in this year’s aborted effort by Democrats to impeach the president on the basis of the Mueller report. Then, in September, Democrats turned on a dime and sought to impeach him in the Ukraine matter.”
Yet, as York explained, voters don’t seem impressed by what Democrats have to offer.
“Democrats got enormous exposure for their case against the president — wall-to-wall coverage on the big three broadcast networks and all the cable news channels,” York lamented. “And what did a significant portion of the public see? A bafflingly complicated tale of bureaucratic infighting, mostly about Ukraine.”
Support slipping
Indeed, the polls back up York’s argument that support for Trump’s impeachment is slipping. According to a November survey by Emerson Polling, 45% of voters now oppose impeaching Trump, while 43% are in favor.
What’s more, “the biggest swing is among [i]ndependents,” without whom Democrats will have a very hard time winning in 2020, Emerson reports.
“So Schiff is rushing, rushing, rushing,” York concludes. “Impeachment is ‘an urgent matter that cannot wait.’ Because politics demands it.”
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