Ann Kuster has picked her side. Given a choice between representing New Hampshire and standing with the radical leftists taking over the Democratic Party, Kuster has chosen the radicals trying to drag the country into a pointless fight over impeachment that would surely drag on through the 2020 election.
Way back in mid-July, Kuster sided with the overwhelming bipartisan majority of the House in voting to table articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. From the night in 2016 when Trump upset Hillary Clinton for the White House, unhinged liberals have not be able to accept the result.
For nearly two years, special counsel Robert Mueller and his huge team of lawyers investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. And for nearly two years, hardly a week went by without some massive scoop citing unnamed sources to claim that Mueller had found rock-solid evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Yet when the report was finally published, there was no evidence of collusion.
The House of Representatives has proven that the Russians have been interfering with our elections and plotting to do so again. The oversight hearings dramatized this chilling effect. The Obama administration continued to ignored such threats, while the Clinton campaign used it as an excuse for its defeat.
The Mueller report should have been an opportunity for Americans to finally move past the 2016 election and not let Vladimir Putin undermine faith in our democracy. This did not happen.
But then House Democrats insisted on holding a pair of hearings hoping that Mueller would testify contrary to his report and implicate the president in a Russian conspiracy. It failed miserably. Mueller confirmed the contents of his report, and refused to play along with the embarrassing spectacle.
Yet following this debacle, widely seen as fatal to the Democrats’ impeachment fantasies, Kuster flip-flopped on impeachment. What changed? Mueller said nothing other than what was in his report, which was available back in April. The facts didn’t change. Kuster did. She surrendered to the growing tide of radicalism in the Democratic caucus.
Does Kuster really believe that a congressional committee will be able to unearth evidence that Mueller failed to find after two years? Does she think she’ll be a more capable investigator than the former head of the FBI? Of course not.
Because the purpose of an impeachment investigation is not to remove President Trump from office. It is to appease radical Democratic activists and prevent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Squad from backing a left-wing challenger in the Democratic primary.
An impeachment inquiry run by House Democrats would be a circus, providing a stage for every crackpot conspiracy theory the left has to offer. It would not do anything to combat Russian interference in our elections, but further divide a nation already torn apart by politics.
House Democrats have proven that they only see Russian interference as a partisan weapon to wield against Republicans. Rather than work across party lines to strengthen our voting systems, they passed a pair of do-nothing bills and then attacked Senate Republicans for not passing them without any debate. We should be helping states harden their election infrastructure, requiring photo ID for all voters and working to ensure that social media sites protect free speech while hunting for fake troll postings designed to inflame our partisan divide.
Wasting the next year on impeachment will be worse than a waste of time. It will be a yearlong slog of resentment and conspiracy, all because of sour grapes over Clinton’s loss. Ann Kuster seemed to realize this a few weeks ago. Then she flip-flopped. She has either become a part of the radical left wing of the Democratic Party or too afraid to stand up to it.
For New Hampshire voters, there’s hardly a difference.
(Steve Negron is a former state representative and Republican candidate in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.)