After resisting the far-left wing of her party for months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday that the House will initiate a “formal impeachment inquiry” against President Donald Trump. Whatever the motivation or justification for the House’s move — or its political effects — the announcement amounts to a declaration of all-out war by Dems against Tweeter in Chief.
The White House released the following statement in response to Pelosi’s move:
In just about every instance imaginable, less “legislative progress” on the part of the federal government is an unalloyed feature for the country, not a bug.
One of those legislative efforts that had been making — depending on you who you read and listen to — progress in recent weeks is the push to enact further restrictions on Americans’ gun rights after recent high profile shootings.
The latest word from those who allegedly know was that the White House was figuring out how to get behind not only a Manchin-Toomey background check bill, but also legislation that would incent more states to enact their own red flag confiscation laws. But with the latest broadside fired by Congressional Democrats, any cooperation that may have been going on is likely over.
Trump pecked out this tweet yesterday after Pelosi’s announcement . . .
The Democrats are so focused on hurting the Republican Party and the President that they are unable to get anything done because of it, including legislation on gun safety, lowering of prescription drug prices, infrastructure, etc. So bad for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2019
If Trump was looking for an excuse not to inflame a good portion of his base of support who own firearms and care about Second Amendment rights, Trump was handed that excuse yesterday on a silver platter.
As Politico points out . . .
It had been five days since Chris Murphy had heard from the Trump administration on negotiations over expanding background checks on gun sales. On the sixth day, the Connecticut Democrat endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
The move sealed what many of Murphy’s colleagues had long suspected: That gun negotiations have fallen apart and may be impossible to resurrect now that the vast majority of House Democrats and a growing minority of Democratic senators are now calling for the president’s impeachment. The prospect of cutting a deal with the president that was at odds with the NRA was always a long-shot, but now it seems downright implausible for Trump to negotiate on guns with Democrats seeking to oust him from office.
Lawmakers like to talk about walking and chewing gum at the same time, but Murphy acknowledges that the march toward impeachment “may temporarily be the end of the road for a lot of legislative initiatives,” including his.
May? Why would Trump stick his neck out to work with Senate Democrats on bills that are guaranteed to piss off a lot of MAGA hat-wearing die-hards when the people on the other side of the negotiating table are openly working to remove him from office?
[I]t was evident Democrats weren’t going to bide their time on impeachment just because Trump hadn’t officially closed the door on guns. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) had also been discussing a firearms package with Republicans that would expand red flag laws, but he too came out for impeachment proceedings on Tuesday.
Blumenthal was less bearish than Murphy, but he’s also less intimately involved with Trump, who has repeatedly assailed Blumenthal on Twitter over the past three years.
“Whatever our stance on impeachment or the whistleblower complaint, we should be moving forward,” Blumenthal said.
What color is the sky in Da Nang Dick’s world?