The idea that impeachment is bad politics seems like oberlearning the lessons of the last war. It was bad politics when Clinton was impeached but good politics when Nixon was inpeached. Maybe the correct lesson is that the political upside correlates to the severity of the crime.
I agree and have made this argument (e.g.., Cohen guilty plea). But as someone who has worked on this for a long time I’ve always been fascinated by the unquestioning acceptance of the premise that impeachment of high crimes is bad politics.
I think part of it is that Dems have always been assuming that the fight would be waged over less than clear-cut crimes, or less than clear evidence that Trump was involved. That’s always been a flawed assumption too as some of us have been saying for years (cc @maxbergmann).
But it’s also self-fulfilling. Dems could have done a lot more over the past two years to educate the public about what the available evidence showed and where this was likely headed. And that effort could have happened on a separate track from the campaign focus on health care.
Moving forward it would be a very good idea for Dems to quickly re-evaluate all of their assumptions about what Mueller will find, and to be prepared for the possibility that the finding is clear collusion involving Trump. In that case the impeachment question is not if but how.
