The Waning Appetite for Impeachment

Former FBI director James Comey writes in the New York Times today:

I hope that Mr. Trump is not impeached and removed from office before the end of his term. I don’t mean that Congress shouldn’t move ahead with the process of impeachment governed by our Constitution, if Congress thinks the provable facts are there. I just hope it doesn’t. Because if Mr. Trump were removed from office by Congress, a significant portion of this country would see this as a coup, and it would drive those people farther from the common center of American life, more deeply fracturing our country.

Polling finds support for impeachment dropping; earlier this month Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi irked some Democrats by declaring that she doesn’t support impeachment, calling it “so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

No one outside of special counsel Robert Mueller and his team knows when they will turn in their report; every now and then someone in Washington claims the probe is “wrapping up.” But we’ve heard variations of that claim and claims in May that it would be wrapped up “by September,” “soon after the November elections,” in December . . .  This is the Brexit of investigations, a probe with more delayed endings than George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series.

A lot of Democrats probably thought they would have the Mueller report by now. The closer we get to Election Day, the sillier it seems to impeach a president who’s about to be evaluated by the country at the ballot box within a matter of years/months.