House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is in the process of forcing an impeachment effort against President Donald Trump through the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, based on the thinnest of pretexts and with zero support from Republicans.
While the impeachment effort may pass a House vote, it’s almost certainly doomed in the GOP-majority Senate — making the whole affair a gigantic waste of time. For this, Pelosi could be sacrificing her party’s future in the next election.
Breitbart’s Michael Patrick Leahy pointed out the striking similarity between Pelosi’s leadership on impeachment and her handling of the equally partisan 2010 Affordable Care Act — while Obamacare was passed without GOP support, Democrats lost control of the House in the next election.
Obamacare vote cost Democrats their majority
The passage of Obamacare marked the first time in American history that such a monumental piece of legislation had been pushed through the House without any bipartisan support.
Refusing to scale down the bill to earn even a little bit of Republican support, Pelosi relied on the Democrat majority to force the bill through over conservative objections.
It proved to be a costly victory for Pelosi, however, as Republicans rode a wave of discontent over Obamacare, among other things, to gain the majority in the House in the next election with a net gain of 63 seats.
A subsequent review of the 2010 elections by political scientists revealed that Obamacare, more than any other issue, had played a significant role in the reversal of the majority — potentially costing Democrats who voted for it upwards of 6-8 percentage points in support prior to any votes being cast — and directly attributing the Obamacare vote to no less than 13 of the 63 Democrat losses.
Partisan impeachment
Fast-forward to the current day and Pelosi, now on her second go-round as Speaker, appears poised to do the same thing again — place her party majority and speakership at risk in order to achieve a purely partisan goal.
Not a single Republican in the House has signaled support for the ongoing impeachment effort against President Trump, and odds are there won’t be any that would actually vote in favor of the articles of impeachment that are likely already in the process being drafted behind closed doors.
In fact, the only thing bipartisan about this impeachment effort is the opposition to it. Two Democrats already voted against the initial launching of the inquiry, and it is believed that more vulnerable Democrats could easily cross the aisle and join Republicans in voting against articles of impeachment.
2010 redux?
Just as Pelosi cajoled and threatened Democrats to fall in line in 2010 and vote for Obamacare, she appears to be doing the same once again with impeachment. Leahy wrote:
The 31 House Democrats who won districts in 2018 that President Trump won in 2016 face a difficult political choice: vote yes to impeach the president and face the wrath of the voters in November, or vote no and face the wrath of Speaker Pelosi from the moment the vote is cast.
Could this whole thing turn out to be a repeat of 2010, resulting in Republicans reclaiming the House majority in 2020? We’ll see.
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