Senator Johnson Wants To Impeach Hillary

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has pretty much already decided Hillary should be impeached if she wins. Johnson, referencing two laws covering the handling of government material, said, “I would say yes, high crime or misdemeanor, I believe she is in violation of both laws…She purposefully circumvented it. This was willful concealment and destruction.”

I had originally thought that this was a last-gasp play for the base by Johnson in his re-election bid against former Senator Russ Feingold. Earlier polls had shown Feingold with a pretty healthy lead and my thought was Johnson was desperate to move his base. But today’s poll for Marquette Law School, the gold standard of polling in Wisconsin, shows Feingold with just a slim one point lead. The same poll showed Hillary up by 6 points. There are a couple of different views on what might be going on here. One interpretation is that Hillary is receiving a large number of crossover votes from Republicans who can just not pull the lever for Trump. A poll in Florida out last night showed that 28% of early voting Republicans had actually voted for Clinton. Taking this view means that Feingold is not so much underperforming as opposed to Clinton overperforming and the Senate race was always going to be tight. If you dismiss the idea of a large crossover vote, then Feingold is severely underperforming and possibly in trouble. Another possibility is that FBI Director Comey’s politically charged intrusion into the election has brought a lot of discouraged GOP voters back into the fold as they feel the need to have a check on Clinton. We’ll have to wait until election day to find out which of these theories is true.

In any case, the comments from Johnson just confirm that the GOP has no strategy or policies left other than to just obstruct any progress Democrats can make. In fact, they have moved to dismantling the norms and standards of our democracy in order to maintain their power. At some point, GOP leaders are going to have to face the fact, just like the Democrats did in the 1990s, that they are going to have to risk alienating a portion of their core supporters by becoming more moderate and showing the ability to govern in order to become relevant in a national election again. So far, it appears that none of today’s GOP leaders is capable of making that move. So it may take another couple of election cycles before the demographic wave turns the GOP into a permanent minority party in Congress as well. It may only be at that point that the GOP can begin to revitalize itself.