How a mayor can help himself

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg is spending $10 million on a 60-second Super Bowl ad, a fraction of the $248 million he has already spent on TV ads.

There is something else Bloomberg could be doing right now to lay the groundwork not only for Trump’s defeat but also for Democrats’ fight to take back the majority in the Senate: Spend $50 million or so in the next week on impeachment ads.

First, Bloomberg can swamp the airwaves in states whose senators are vulnerable in 2020.

Second, if Trump’s attorneys and Republican senators seriously believe that it is not impeachable to illegally withhold foreign aid to an ally for the purpose of extracting a political favor to the president and to block Congress from investigating that conduct, then we have a monarch, not a president.

Third, what is at stake is democracy, the notion that Americans decide elections. Neither the president of Russia nor the president of Ukraine gets to decide our leaders.

Bloomberg’s impeachment-focused messaging will not get two-thirds of the Senate to vote to remove Trump. But it might move public opinion and thereby put sufficient pressure on Republicans such as Sens. Susan Collins, Gory Gardner or Martha McSally to vote for witnesses.

And if the ads do not compel Republicans to stop covering up Trump’s impeachable conduct or to remove him, at the very least they may impress upon voters that their Republican senator is on the side of Trump, corrupt oligarchs and Russian President Vladimir Putin, not the Constitution, democracy and their constituencies. They might remind those soft Republican voters that re-electing Trump would be a constitutional nightmare.

If he put some of his millions to focus on impeachment, Bloomberg would endear himself to Democrats, prime the pump for November’s presidential election, and move the needle in key Senate races. He finally might show us that his effort is more than a vanity campaign.