Donald Trump is losing the public opinion battle on whether he's a crook. Multiple polls have found that a solid majority of Americans still believe Trump committed crimes before becoming president (57-28 percent in the latest Q poll) and the country's roughly split on whether he's done so since taking office (46-46 percent). That's a pretty damning ratio for a sitting president.
Similarly, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week showed 60 percent of Americans believe Trump lied about the Russia investigation and only 29 percent say Robert Mueller's report cleared Trump of wrongdoing. Those numbers are pretty spot, on given that one-third of the population is hermetically sealed from reality.
But where Republicans see an opening is in a somewhat anemic public appetite for impeaching the crook in the Oval Office. While 48 percent oppose the initiation of impeachment hearings, 49 percent say either impeach now (17 percent) or continue investigating (32 percent).
“The American public has reached a hung jury,” observed Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who helped conduct the survey. “Not innocent, not guilty, and they haven’t reached a consensus.”
For Republicans, there's no time like the present to exploit that opening. Given that most Americans already believe Trump is a congenitally dishonest criminal, allowing Democrats to continue probing Trump's wrongdoing only stands to make things worse. Thus Tuesday's full-court press to impede Democratic progress—working to block both former White House counsel Don McGahn and special counsel Robert Mueller from testifying as Republicans uniformly declare "case closed" on the Russia matter.
It's deeply disingenuous, definitely obstructionist, and maybe even illegal, but it's as good a play politically as Republicans have, to be honest.
The problem is, however unsound their legal grounds, Trump and Republicans are working to stall out any serious revelations until the public loses its investigatory appetite altogether. In effect, they're looking to foreclose the window of opportunity while the country is still split on the issue.
It's time for Democrats, who have been exceedingly level-headed in their approach to investigating, to fish or cut bait. They're now facing legal battles on every front of their investigation into Trump—his taxes and financial records, other document production, and witness testimony from people like Mueller and McGahn. As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent pointed out, "If Democrats don't get more serious about an impeachment inquiry, they could squander months in court, only to see their oversight authority largely neutered -- at which point they would be out of options."
At this point, no one can reasonably make the legal argument that Democrats haven’t exhausted most of their avenues to gain cooperation from the White House. They now need the power of declaring an impeachment inquiry to strengthen their hand in every one of these legal battles.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday morning, "We can't impeach [Trump] for political reasons and we can't not impeach him for political reasons. We have to see where the facts take us."
The problem is, the time is now for the American public to start seeing those facts—not several months from now, or even longer.