‘Impeach’ movement not centered here
There are no indications Columbus is a hotbed of impeachment talk, but that hasn’t stopped outside organizations from trying to light a fire here to charge President Donald Trump with offenses warranting removal from office.
Most recently, billionaire investor Tom Steyer last week picked Columbus to launch a 30-city tour of impeachment town-hall meetings.
In February, activists with Mad Dog PAC included the Hilliard area among sites for a handful of “Impeachment Now” billboards it has bought across the country.
Whether the movement gains steam depends on the president himself, or maybe it turns on how well advisers can temper his impetuous behavior.
The more the president stirs the pot with controversial firings and taunting tweets, the more support impeachment promoters stand to collect.
Steyer, a San Franciscobased investment banker, has been ranting for months that Trump should be impeached. In his Columbus rally and in conversation with The Dispatch, Steyer said the president’s impeachable offenses are many, with failure to protect democracy chief among them. He attracted about 100 to the town hall here on Thursday, with a similar number reported Friday in Cincinnati; not a groundswell of support.
“Make America America Again” is the tagline on billboards backed by the political action committee founded by Claude Taylor, a former staff member to President Bill Clinton. The impeachment billboard getting the most media attention was strategically placed last week near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
A resolution to impeach Trump was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in January but quickly tabled in a 355-66 vote, with Rep. Joyce Beatty of Blacklick voting against the move to postpone discussion.
If impeachment talk continues, voters everywhere might want to bone up on their civics. Impeachment is the bringing of charges against a president or other U.S. officials in the House, followed by a Senate trial.
Given Congress’ current GOP makeup, impeachment is highly unlikely, which reveals the real point of impeachment talk — building steam for midterm elections in November.
As much as Gov. John Kasich has criticized most of what Donald Trump has done, it was shocking to hear him ape the president last week by borrowing one of his most-repeated taunts. Kasich, a vocal supporter of free-press principles, is about the last person political observers would expect to use that phrase.
But the fact Kasich did utter it in a news conference demonstrates why bullies like Trump use name-calling and other creative labeling to deflect bad news and keep it from sticking to them. Say it often enough and phrases like “fake news” creep into our consciousness and soon even legitimate reports are hastily questioned.
To his credit — and once again contrasting himself with the president — the governor soon told The Dispatch he was wrong to blast an earlier report on state job-creation numbers as “fake news.” The numbers initially reported were, in fact, wrong — but the source of the error was the state Department of Job and Family Services.
Corrected figures from the state were not as high as Kasich would like, but he is harmed as much by what he later explained was a joking comment. Trouble is, journalists don’t find such jokes at all funny.