Impeachment proceedings against a president whose approval ratings are in the high forties could easily blow up in the Democrats' faces as David Marcus at http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/11/why-democrats-would-be-insane-to-impeach-donald-trump/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=e28d0d6e26-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-e28d0d6e26-83778945 The Federalist explains.
Marcus opines that it would be a grave error on the part of the Democrats to impeach Trump and offers several reasons, chief among which are the similarities with the last impeachment of a president. Here's a summary:
Clinton’s troubles began with having a difficult time keeping his pants on. Also like Trump, lying about and trying to obfuscate an illicit tryst was eventually the high crime or misdemeanor that Republicans in the House in 1998 latched onto.The House can impeach the president, i.e. bring charges against him, but it is the role of the Senate to convict and there's zero chance of that happening, as of now, in the GOP-controlled Senate.
When the dust settled from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999, his approval rating sat at an astounding 73 percent. That’s a note of caution to Democrats who believe that, having taken the House of Representatives, they should impeach Donald Trump....
[W]hile the American people did not believe Clinton, they also did not believe he had acted badly enough for Congress to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election....
Let’s think about this for a minute. The thrice-married Trump, who has been known to boast about adultery like a suburban dad who won the best lawn in the neighborhood award, apparently had sex with a porn star and a Playboy playmate. That seems about par for his course.
But wait! He lied about it! Well, yeah, also pretty much behavior we knew about and expected. But there’s more! He might have violated campaign finance law! Okay, but so do a lot of campaigns. Usually they pay a fine and we all move along.
The Democrats know this and even the most otiose voter will learn it eventually. The electorate will thus see the Democrats' efforts as a grand waste of time and money whose only purpose was to hurt Trump politically.
This is precisely why President Clinton gained so much support from the Republicans' attempts to get him out of office. It was seen as a mean-spirited overreach, an effort to destroy a man for political reasons.
Marcus closes with this:
Trump’s eventual and almost certain acquittal in the Senate would be just as much a victory for him as it was for Bill Clinton. The Democrats, including presidential hopefuls, who supported it would be roundly embarrassed by having wasted the nation’s time, money, and attention tilting at an impossible windmill.Actually, it might be easier to try to get Trump convicted of whatever charges the House Democrats bring against him than to explain to the American people how or why any of them would offer the nation a superior alternative to Donald Trump.
This is not a close call. If at some point Robert Mueller, CNN, or the Washington Post discover some crime that even Senate Republicans admit is disqualifying for Trump’s presidency, then by all means, impeach him. Nothing we have seen so far suggests that such a contingency is particularly likely.
For the sake of the country’s sanity, and their own political chances, the Democrats should holster their impeachment pistol and worry about explaining to Americans why one of them, not Trump, should be president of the United States.