REPUBLICANS IN DISARRAY
For the mainstream media, there’s no more surefire ratings-friendly narrative than “Democrats in disarray.” Liberals stay tuned in out of fear when they hear this narrative, and conservatives stay tuned in because it gives them hope. In fact we’re seeing it happen right now, simply because House Democrats aren’t in 100% perfect agreement about how many articles of impeachment to bring against Donald Trump.
In reality, the House Democrats are firmly aligned behind Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, whether they agree with every last detail of the decisions she’s making or not. Instead the “disarray” increasingly appears to be on the other side of the aisle. The Republicans are descending into darn near chaos as they suddenly realize they’re about to have to hold a Senate impeachment trial that’ll go poorly for them no matter how they approach it.
Lindsey Graham is currently using a televised Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to try and fail to find a way to spin the DOJ Inspector General report into some kind of Trump impeachment defense. The trouble for Graham is that if he pushes Trump’s most deranged conspiracy theories too hard, mainstream voters will conclude that Senate Republicans are in on Trump’s crime spree, and punish them in 2020 accordingly.
Even as Graham tries to thread the needle between somewhat deranged and extremely deranged, House Republicans like Jim Banks are publicly demanding that Graham take things all the way to eleven on the derangement scale. That’s right, the Republicans in Congress are in disarray because many of them think Lindsey Graham isn’t insane enough.
Of course this is all secondary to the fact that Mitch McConnell, not Lindsey Graham or Jim Banks or anyone else, will be the one deciding how the Senate impeachment trial goes. McConnell only cares about getting himself reelected in 2020 and maintaining a Senate Republican majority by any dishonest means possible. He’ll use the impeachment trial to defend Trump, but only to the extent that it happens to match up with his own corrupt agenda. But it’s clear that McConnell is going to face all kinds of pushback from his own party over this, because thanks to Trump’s ongoing implosion, the Republicans are in disarray.
