Here’s why you shouldn’t expect impeachment anytime soon

  1. A substantial part of that base voted for Trump as a rebuke to the very people who hate him so much.
  2. Another sizeable faction doesn’t particularly care for Trump but likes to see him appointing conservative judges and being more assertive with China.
  3. A third faction is made up of staunch party loyalists who think they should stand by their team. As long as those three factions line up against impeachment — and right now, they overwhelmingly do — Trump will stay firmly seated in the Oval Office.

So the question for impeachophiles is “how many of those voters can be moved?” The die-hard Trump supporters probably can’t be, but the other groups are potentially at least persuadable. That brings us to the question of how to persuade them. And to Justin Amash, the Michigan representative who just broke ranks with his party by calling for Trump’s impeachment.

..In that scenario, a defector such as Amash is essential: A single defection assures impeachment-curious Republicans of company on the other side of the aisle. Once one brave soul breaks ranks, the defections start to snowball into an avalanche as opinions shift among the Republican voters who still shape their political positions around signals from their party’s leaders.

That scenario is also why you shouldn’t expect impeachment anytime soon.

.. Trump’s transgressions, by contrast, were almost immediately overhyped as hard evidence of an active conspiracy with a foreign power. Now that’s been downgraded to possible obstruction of justice, and public attention is bound to wander. Nor will it be easy to remove the president on a purely procedural charge without proving an underlying crime. Just ask the Republicans who futilely impeached Bill Clinton.

Moreover, as 2020 creeps closer, the argument strengthens for just letting voters sort things out. Republican politicians would certainly regard that course as the least likely to prompt a primary challenge. And to state the obvious one more time, that’s the course they’re going to take.