Is the impeachment ship sinking?

Well, it's always a pretty good sign of it when the 'rats are fleeing the ship.

That's the case with Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who's getting ready to scrap the 'Rat designation and become a Republican to boot. According to Politico:

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a moderate Democrat who is strongly opposed to impeaching President Donald Trump, is expected to switch parties and become a Republican, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Van Drew is one of two Democrats who voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Trump and has remained against the effort, even as the House prepares to vote to impeach the president next week. Van Drew's decision comes after a meeting with Trump on Friday.

According to Conservative Tree House, that's got Democratic leaders panicking.

Politico argues it's related to Van Drew's individual political prospects, which aren't bright in his district.

But in reality, it's the latest sign that impeachment is going down like the Titanic. Van Drew is keeping his party affiliation Democratic for the impeachment vote in order to exact maximum pain on the Democrats as members peel off. If he flees the sinking ship, there may be others who follow.

What a far cry it all was when Democrats were announcing things going in their favor a few months ago when a wave of Republicans retired. Back then, it was a sign of Republicans supposedly not wanting to face more election losses.

Now it's Democrats heading for the exits. They know which way the political winds blow.

We already know that the polls are showing President Trump taking a sharp leap upward in public approval, not just among Republican stalwarts, but among new amd critical voting blocs - blacks, Latinos, independents, people from Wisconsin. And competitive voting numbers have flipped -- Trump now beats every Democrat in head-to-head lineups in polls, too. That wasn't the case before the impeachment train took off. 

There's circumstantial evidence, too -- Trump is rolling in campaign money from small-dollar donors and there's a ferociously confident Trump campaign game on the ground going on, with aggressive expansions planned in places such as Minnesota. Trump campaign rallies are absolutely huge and Trump seems to be having a fine old time, leaving them laughing when he makes these stops.

Among Democrats, meanwhile, such confidence wasn't there. Recall Nancy Pelosi's strained face when she announced a few days ago that impeachment would go forward.

Recall also that the strategy was herky jerky, too. First, it was going to be a quick one. Then it was going to be an extended one. Then it was going to be a quick one again, so as not to interfere with all those Democrats from the Senate who were running for president. Then it was going to be impeachment over and over until something stuck, forget the job of being a congressperson and passing laws to make things better.

And the fact that impeachment was rigged against Republicans made it all foregone that Democrats were  in a sinking ship. Rigging instead of bringing their case into the daylight, for starters, suggested they didn't have a case at all. The hearings that mattered were basement-held secret affairs designed for Democrats to cherrypick the most useful witnesses and selectively leak negative news about Trump. The witnesses chosen had no firsthand knowledge of anything, any more than the original "whistleblower" who started the whole fraudy maneuver, which seems to be centered around the absurd argument that corrupt wretched Ukraine, a country Democrats have never cared about until now, is now somehow central to U.S. national security and there is no national security otherwise. All they really had was their well-known hatred for Trump. After that, Democrats shut out Republicans from asking any questions at the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am public hearings of some of these people. Then the Democrats finished the entire affair within a day or so by introducing for us three screaming leftist professors.

Leftist pundits wondered why nobody was interested at this point. CNN's all-impeachment, all-the-time coverage led to ratings that spiraled down the toilet. Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan pretty much argued that the public was stupid and would only get interested in impeachment if Democrats and their media allies took a "movie-trailer approach" (kid you not) instead. 

Then we got a new round of theatrics of another sort: hushed tones and pious statements from Democrats such as Rep. Eric Swallwell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, invoking 'prayerful' claptrap, the Founding Fathers, and 'fate of the republic at stake' drool. Swallwell's famous fart in the middle of this stuff was nature's way of delivering a verdict about the value of such crap.

No wonder the public tuned out and quit paying attention. Former Gov. John Kasich was the first to note that people are 'not talking about this' in Ohio, a key warning. Now Power Line Scott Johnson has far more damning proof - he took a gander at the Minneapolis Star Tribune's 'most read' and 'most emailed' stories on the big impeachment day two days ago and found .... no interest whatsoever. Impeachment may have been splattered all over Page One and all over the net, but the public was more interested in ... bear stories. 

It wasn't taking off and it never took off, because the whole thing was so partisan and fact-free.

One thing the public did know, though, is that Democrats had been impeachment-minded against Trump, the man they elected, from day one. That had to have made it old news, and pretty well made it pretty dismissable, too. The fact that it was a tilting-windmill exercise too, because the Senate wasn't going to convict, probably made even more tune out. There was zero suspense in a long foregone vote. No wonder nobody's mind was changed.

But it's not a symbolic exercise. Every day Democrats have spent on impeachment is a day less they have spent on legislating and working with President Trump. The public can see this much and they're getting sick of it. Nancy Pelosi knew that impeachment was a Big Loser because she's been around long enough to remember the last time the other party tried it and was thrown out on their ear by voters two decades ago. Now it's happening again and the public is reacting exactly the same way she knew they were going to react. Yet her party is so crazy even she was unable to muscle them. She's so afraid of all sides she now says she won't enforce a 'whip' vote on impeachment, either. And we know she's terrified of the far-left 'Squad.'

So now she's watching the Gotterdammerung. Impeachment is not only not going to win in the Senate, it's probably going to cost Democrats their House majority and her own Speakership. Worse still, the rats are fleeing the sinking ship, and who knows how many will follow. It's her worst nightmare coming to life. Couldn't happen to a better bunch of malcontents blinded crazy by their unwavering hatred for Trump.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter