Intent on keeping the focus on the GOP agenda, Democrats see the impeachment push bubbling up in their caucus as a political loser.
House Democrat Shri Thanedar (D., Mich.) walked out of the Speaker’s lobby on Thursday feeling slightly dejected. The day before, House Democrats had pressured him not to force a vote on his seven-article impeachment resolution against Donald Trump.
As Thanedar tells it, many of his colleagues expressed to him privately that attempting to impeach the president while in the minority would distract from the party’s current messaging strategy – namely, efforts to impugn congressional Republicans for planning to cut entitlements in this year’s reconciliation bill.
“We got to hold the Republicans accountable for the cuts in Medicaid, cuts in veteran services, cuts in the SNAP program,” the Michigan Democrat told National Review. “Some people felt they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with both issues, and the impeachment may overshadow the Republicans efforts to cut away essential programs Americans need.”
Translation: Most congressional Democrats view a third prospective impeachment as a losing political strategy in the current political climate. Out of power and divided on strategy, Democrats view their party’s united opposition to Republicans’ legislative agenda as one of the only things that is keeping the party together a few months into Trump’s second term.
That means — for now, at least — any initiative that might distract from this messaging strategy will be batted down internally, even as most Democrats are already convinced that the president has committed impeachable acts during his second term.
“What I heard from a lot of members is — it’s not necessarily that a lot of members think Trump shouldn’t be impeached, but I think people are thinking through like, we’re really on this Medicaid conversation right now” and should “really focus in on these issues right now,” progressive Representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) said in an interview. If there comes a time where it “makes sense to move forward with something like that,” Frost added, Democrats must ensure that “everyone” is “along for the ride,” so that “it’s not just one person doing it on their own.”
Even Senator Jon Ossoff, who is uniquely vulnerable as a red state Democrat up for reelection this cycle, told his constituents at a recent town hall that Trump has already crossed the line into impeachable territory, though he cautioned that his party needs to retake control of Congress before Trump can be made to answer for his misconduct.
“There is no doubt that this president’s conduct has already exceeded any prior standard for impeachment by the United States House of Representatives,” Ossoff said at a town hall in April when pressed by a constituent to impeach and convict Trump. “I agree with you, but as I said at the beginning, I also have no choice but to be candid with you about the situation that we face and the tools that are at our disposal.”
“The only way to achieve what you want to achieve is to have a majority in the United States House of Representatives,” he said, adding: “Believe me, I’m working on it every single day, every single day.”
Behind closed doors, Democrats think that Thanedar’s impeachment articles – which accuse Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors related to executive actions surrounding trade, treaties, and congressionally mandated funds — are motivated by the Michigan Democrat’s desire to boost his own anti-Trump credentials amid a new primary challenge.
It’s no wonder, then, that early afternoon on Wednesday, ahead of a scheduled vote on a motion to table Thanedar’s seven-article resolution, House Democrats were dodging questions about the impeachment articles or even blasting the Michigan Democrat for a poorly timed anti-Trump resistance effort that is dead on arrival in both GOP-controlled chambers.
“It’s a distraction,” Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) told National Review on Wednesday, adding that Democrats would be well advised to spend their political capital focusing on the economy and the administration’s “violation of the Constitution” instead. “I don’t think he should bring it forward,” the California Democrat added.
Republican control of both chambers makes the impeachment calculus much tougher for Democrats in 2025, given there’s little chance the party could muster enough GOP votes to impeach him in the House, let alone convict him in the Senate.
“There has to be a strategy surrounding it and there wasn’t one yesterday,” Representative Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) told National Review on Thursday. “It needs to be thought out, it needs to bring the caucus around it.”
“The timing wasn’t right,” she said. “And it may never be.”
Some Democrats publicly acknowledge the political perils of impeaching the president even while in the majority – especially given that, along with his various criminal indictments, Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachment trials didn’t hurt his standing among GOP voters. If anything, Trump’s grip on the party became even stronger after the 2021 trial.
While Representative Don Beyer (D., Va.) thinks that “there are many things that Trump could be impeached for” – citing his various “assaults” on the law and the Constitution – he doesn’t believe it makes constitutional or political sense to impeach the president if the effort won’t go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Washington.
In his view, Thanedar’s resolution was “performative” in nature, much like efforts to censure some of the more extreme members of Congress in recent years. “It doesn’t seem like a winning political strategy at all,” Beyer said of impeachment. “The better way to make the statement is to win with elections, including presidential elections,” he added, and “to project our values through legislation.”
It’s not hard to imagine that Democrats will impeach the president for the third time if they retake the House in the 2026 midterms. But even then, mustering 60 votes in the Senate for conviction will be a very difficult task – no matter the conduct in question.
This narrative hasn’t stopped impeachment-obsessed Representative Al Green – the elderly Texas Democrat who waved his cane in the air during Trump’s joint address before Congress earlier this year — from drafting yet another Trump impeachment resolution. Green said in a May 16 letter to his colleagues that he will force an impeachment vote “at a time to be determined,” though this effort isn’t expected to garner party-wide support.
Nor is Thanedar convinced that the political effectiveness of impeachment matters, even though he’s standing down for now. “We sometimes take on fights because it’s the right fight to take on. It’s the right issue, right position to take on, not so much worrying about, is this a winning fight or not?” he told National Review last week. “The fight doesn’t depend on are we going to win or not. The fight is because it’s the right thing to do and he has done so much unconstitutional activities.”
“It’s almost like I have yet to meet a person disagrees with me that his conduct is not impeachable,” Thanedar added.