That crackling sound before the avalanche: Blue-city safe-seat Democrat defects on impeachment
Well, gee: The impeachment hearings are apparently all wrapped up, with impeachment-master Rep. Adam Schiff preparing his report to the House Judiciary Committee. It's a done deal. Game over. Clear as day. Even Peggy Noonan herself said so.
Except that with all this grand showcasing and unity talk, Democrats are now...heading for the hills.
Here's a bad one, at least, from the Democrat point of view:
Michigan Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a prominent supporter of Kamala Harris who has previously supported the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, abruptly announced Sunday that she no longer saw any "value" in the process and called for her fellow Democrats to throw their support behind a symbolic censure resolution.
Lawrence's about-face came as polls have shown that independents are souring on the idea of impeaching and removing Trump from office, including in critical battleground states like Wisconsin, even as House Democrats aggressively presented their focus-group-tested "bribery" case against the president over the past two weeks.
Far from Lawrence being a swing-state Democrat or having any need to pay attention to independents, which the pundits, pollsters, and Democrat operatives are all focused on, Lawrence is a Democrat in a deep-blue city in an extremely safe seat.
And right at the critical moment, with the impeachment sort of wrapped up, she's getting the heck out of Dodge. She's bailing on them. She says she'll be happy with "censure," a meaningless gesture. She doesn't want to go down with the sinking impeachment ship. She knows trouble when she sees it, even from in the safest of the safe districts, and she wants out.
That's colossally bad news for Democrats, who've put all their eggs in the impeachment basket, because that's all they've got.
Other Democrats are undoubtedly going to notice that little detail about Lawrence not being from a swing district, and they're going to start asking themselves if they're as safe as they think they are, what with the 2020 election coming on.
Maybe that's because two polls are showing that a whopping 34% of black voters approve of President Trump. Worse still, another poll shows that a majority — that's right: a majority — of black voters are dead set against impeachment. Think Lawrence is reading those polls?
It can't be otherwise. Given a choice of her voters, or white lefty Hollywood-area representative Adam Schiff's pious flapdoodle Schiff show, whom is Lawrence, or any safe-seat blue Democrat with many black voters, going to choose?
It jibes with earlier polls showing that about 132 Democrats were against any impeachment at the end of last summer. Ten more — a lot of them black congressional representatives — remained on the record as of September to say they didn't favor impeachment. Two peeled off when the decision was made to convert the impeachment inquiry into formal hearings, two old white guys with nothing to lose. The Dems marshaled 232 votes for it, but only 32 said they absolutely wanted impeachment. Another may have defected since. Now, with Lawrence bailing, we have the defections extending into the deep blue Democrat territory and, very dangerously for Democrats, involving black representatives and the black voters who elected them. The list of wobbly ten includes a lot of black congresspeople who aren't in nearly as safe districts. But now even being in a so-called safe blue district is no place of safety for even a black Democrat.
Lawrence's exit means something. This could be the start of an avalanche of defections for Democrats. Impeachment is going to lose, even if it passes in the House. Who wants to be a loser if it can be avoided? These Democrats are getting out before the whole thing takes them down as losers, too. If this is the logic, then this is going to turn into an avalanche.