Some Dems Appear To Be Getting Squeamish On Impeachment

Some Democrats appear to be getting squeamish over the idea of impeaching President Trump despite having promised it to their increasingly angry and unstable base and there just may be trouble in paradise when it comes to their new House majority.

Leading Dems including newly-minted Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been coy about impeachment, instead vowing to conduct a mind-boggling number of investigations which will be headed by the most venomous Trump haters who have been installed as committee chairs and then to wait on the Mueller report as the smoking gun.

Whether this is just a cynical maneuver to keep the issue alive until 2020 remains to be seen but thanks to one of the touted incoming freshmen class who triggered a firestorm after her video of her telling activists that ‘We’re gonna impeach the motherf*cker’ went viral the mettle of the resistance will be tested.

Now Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib has set off an internal crisis that could splinter the party by sucking all of the air out of the impeachment balloon just as it was taking off. The aftermath of Tlaib’s profanity-drenched war whoop and her subsequent refusal to apologize has many Dems distancing themselves from her and so is the media.

Via Politico, “Dems livid after Tlaib vows to ‘impeach the motherf—er’”:

House Democrats are furious that an incoming freshman’s expletive-riddled statement about impeaching Donald Trump has suddenly upended their carefully crafted rhetoric on their plans to take on the president.

Rank-and-file Democrats, immediately fearful of the damage the comment could cause, unloaded on their new colleague Friday morning. Republicans, they argued, would hold it up as proof that Democrats are playing politics rather than pursuing genuine oversight of the president — even if the GOP never showed interest in investigating Trump scandals while it was in power.

“Mueller hasn’t even produced his report yet!” said Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. “People should cool their jets a little bit, let the prosecutors do their job and finish the investigation.”

“Inappropriate,” added Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.). “As elected officials I think we should be expected to set a high bar… It’s not helpful.”

Even Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who introduced an impeachment resolution earlier this week, was shocked. His eyes bulged in disbelief when a reporter read him Tlaib’s comments and he was speechless for several seconds.

After he regained his composure, Sherman said that kind of language is detrimental to the cause: “That’s not language I would use … I think the office of the presidency should be treated with respect.”

Party elders also sought to calm talk of impeachment without criticizing Tlaib directly. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, called Talib’s comments “inappropriate” and said, “We need to be patient.”

“You can’t accomplish very much of anything unless you have civility and show respect for your colleagues,” Cummings said. “Those kind of comments do not take us in the right direction.”

According to the New York Times, “Rashida Tlaib’s Expletive-Laden Cry to Impeach Trump Upends Democrats’ Talking Points”:

Impeachment was always going to hang heavily over a divided Washington. But it took little more than 24 hours this week for a freshman House Democrat’s exuberant, expletive-laden impeachment promise to upend the bonhomie of a new Congress and prompt President Trump, by his own telling, to ask the newly elected speaker if Democrats planned to impeach him.

The episode began Thursday night, just hours after the 116th Congress was sworn in, when a camera captured Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan promising profanely to impeach Mr. Trump as she drew cheers from liberal activists at a celebration at a bar near the Capitol. By the time Mr. Trump discussed the matter directly in a news conference in the Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, weeks of speculation about his potential peril had burst into the open.

Republicans, eager to portray Democrats as out to destroy Mr. Trump’s presidency, piled on criticism of Ms. Tlaib — some of it racially tinged. (Ms. Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, is one of the first Muslims in Congress. The Christian Broadcasting Network referred to her as a “foul-mouthed Islamic congresswoman.”) Democratic leaders, who view discussion of impeachment as politically dangerous and premature, offered worried words meant to tamp down speculation about their intentions.

Tlaib’s obscene invective appears to have many Dems in a state of panic:

But the extremists are doubling down:

As for the radical who whacked the hornet’s nest?

The hatred of Trump and anticipation of blood vengeance has been the glue that has held together a squabbling and noisy collection of competing identity groups who have little in common other than their shared resentment over a lost election and Pelosi is going to quickly find out that keeping her collection of zanies on the reservation is going to be akin to herding cats.