I&I Editorial

Republicans thinking about supporting the impeachment of President Donald Trump should consider this: If Trump is removed from office before the November 2020 elections, it would virtually guarantee that the next president will be Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with enough power in Congress to carry out much of her radical agenda.

In the week since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the start of an impeachment inquiry, the biggest loser in the polls has been Joe Biden. Support for Biden among Democrats dropped from 30.3% in the Real Clear Politics average to 27.2%. Warren’s numbers have climbed from 19.2% to 23%.

In other words, the gap between Biden’s lead went from more than 11 points to just 4.2 in the span of a week. Warren also managed to expand her lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders’ flagging campaign.

We’re not the only ones noticing that impeachment puts Warren in the catbird’s seat.

Stephen Auth of Federated Investors told CNBC, “the market is saying, look if anything, what this does is it increases the odds of a Warren nomination.”

Raymond James strategists Ed Mills and Chris Meekins wrote this week that “We believe Warren is within striking distance of winning both the nomination and White House,” and “the market under-appreciates Warren’s ability to capture the nomination and win the presidency.”

The Economist reports that “Elizabeth Warren could benefit from the impeachment saga.” Vanity Fair declared that “it’s just what Elizabeth Warren needed.”

Much of that speculation has focused on the fact that Biden himself is tied into the Ukraine story. When he was vice president, Biden got Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that was paying Biden’s son Hunter $600,000 a year to sit on its board despite having no qualifications (other than his relationship to the sitting vice president).

But even if Biden had no connection whatsoever to the impeachment inquiry, he’d still be on the losing end.

That’s because the only reason Biden has been getting front-runner status in the polls is that Democrats figured he’d have the best chance of beating Trump. As we’ve noted in this space, Biden is entirely out of step with the increasingly socialistic Democratic party – 70% of which now says socialism is a “good thing,” according to a recent Gallup Poll.

If Democrats believe that Trump has been mortally wounded by the impeachment, or if Republicans in the Senate actually decide to remove him from office, Biden’s supposed advantage in beating Trump evaporates. Any Democrat would have a solid chance of winning.

In that case, the base of the Democratic Party will almost certainly toss Biden overboard in favor of a more committed leftist, and right now Warren is the most appealing. She’s embraced every far-left policy proposal out there, from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal. She’s running on an anti-corruption platform. And unlike Sanders, she’s not an old white guy.

But could she get elected?

Absolutely. After Richard Nixon’s resignation on the eve of the House approving articles of impeachment, Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford by tying him to Nixon’s corruption. No matter who ran in 2020, Democrats would wrap Trump’s impeachment around their knecks.

What’s more, a President Warren would almost certainly have a majority in the House and Senate.

The first time voters had a chance to weigh in after Nixon’s resignation, they handed 49 more seats over to Democrats in the House and four in the Senate. Two years later, they handed the presidency to Carter. A loss of four Senate seats in 2020 would give control to the Democrats.

Warren Would Mean Far More ‘Change’ Than Obama

Warren won’t need a Democratic supermajority in the Senate to make her quasi-socialist dreams a reality. Back in April, Warren explicitly endorsed the idea of eliminating the Senate filibuster, saying it’s being “used by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything.”

“When the Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems in this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster,” she said.

Eliminating the filibuster would give Warren the ability to enact most of her agenda. Socialized medicine, the destruction of the U.S. energy industry on the altar of climate change, waves of new regulations, an economically ruinous wealth tax. A country forever changed.

Does it seem farfetched? Well, voters elected Barack Obama after Democrats succeeded in thoroughly demonizing President George W. Bush in the midst of a war and a recession, and gave Obama a veto-proof majority in the Senate. In exchange, the country got strapped with Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, tax hikes, and a historically lackluster economy.

As we’ve stated repeatedly in this space, we are agnostic about the merits of the Democrats’ current impeachment claim, except to say that there are few actual facts available and the ones that are don’t show that Trump did anything on the scale of what Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans been repeatedly asserting.

In the end, however, evidence won’t matter. Politics will. More specifically, how Republicans handle the ensuing weeks and months. If polls veer in favor of the Senate voting to remove Trump from office, will they hold together, or buckle? Will they try to portray the current impeachment frenzy as nothing more than the next phase of the Democrats’ never-ending attempt to overturn a legitimate election? Or will they try to gain “respectability” by listening to Never-Trump Republicans and dumping the president?

Democrats faced a similar conundrum 20 years ago. Despite whatever qualms they had about President Bill Clinton’s scandalous actions and his sleazy character, they vigorously protected him. Democrats simply dismissed the fact that Clinton had committed perjury and obstructed justice for personal gain – to say nothing of his Oval Office conduct that was unquestionably unbecoming of a president. They convinced the country that his actual crimes were no big deal, that it was all about sex, and that impeachment was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

After Republicans failed to remove Clinton from office in 1999, Democrats gained four seats in the Senate and one in the House, and Vice President Al Gore got half a million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000. Gore would have taken the White House were it not for 537 votes in Florida.

Democrats hope impeachment will drive Trump out of office. So do Never Trumpers, who apparently operate under the delusion that removing Trump would save the GOP, and that a replacement Republican candidate could beat someone as radical as Warren in 2020.

We just hope Senate Republicans understand the enormous stakes involved in their decision. Ardent socialist Democrats running the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives will upend America beyond repair.

— Written by I&I Editorial Board

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