Politico is reporting that a few moderate Democrats are floating trying to back out of impeachment for a lesser form of response:
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/1 ... ent-080311It's hard to get my head around what atrocious, cowardly instincts these people have even before realizing they have a lot of power over the party's agenda.
At a certain point, you have to realize that hitching yourself to these people is itself a form of surrender and you're better off just directing your effort to making sure they don't get elected. You're into some very tough choices on short vs. long-term strategy at that point.
My best theory for these people is this:
A lot of them are in Trump-friendly swing districts and have just inane ideas about what best promotes their precarious election chances. They won in 2018 because midterm elections are generally good for the party opposite the Presidential incumbent with the popularity of the Presidential incumbent going a long way to determining how strong their advantage is. A rising tide lifts all boats, and Trump's unpopularity in a mid-term was sufficient to tilt swing and light red districts into their column. You can predict the final 2018 House results almost entirely by just looking at a few generic numbers without getting into the dynamics of specific races.
Presidential elections where there is an incumbent have a lot to do with the popularity of the Presidential incumbent. They also now have very strong coattail effects for down-ballot races in the House. The single most important factor on whether these Democrats are reelected is going to be how popular Trump is and/or how much illicit election interference he and his boosters can get away with.
Their behavior is about as ill-conceived as possible for driving Trump's numbers down. They are obsessed with their next election chances, but adopt a terrible strategy for maximizing their chances. Why?
Well, one idea I have is that these are people who ran election campaigns where they had to make countless decisions about what to say and do under the belief that those choices were meaningful for determining if they would win. They had consultants giving them advice on what to say and do to win. And they did it. And they won. This may be giving them a mistaken impression that what they were saying and doing - largely campaigning on solving specific issues and a sense of bipartisan cooperation - is what they need to do to win. This is so god damn dumb, but the election process might select people who think that way. It's amusing when you contrast against Republicans, a party filled top to bottom with people who believe the Earth is a few thousand years old, managing to understand how nationalized politics works at a basic level.
That might be totally wrong, though. Whatever is going on, it's unacceptable. They're people obsessed with appearing that they care about doing the right thing over political maneuvering by engaging in awful political maneuvering in lieu of doing the right thing.