Negotiations over a big infrastructure bill hit a huge pothole on Wednesday. President Trump’s declaration that the Democrats have to choose between “infrastructure or investigations” struck many observers as petty and foolish. But as a political matter, he’s absolutely right.

House Democrats have the constitutional right to investigate the president, and even to impeach him as they see fit. No one disputes that.

But by pursuing bipartisan compromise simultaneously, they are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, House Democrats largely brand Trump as ethically and intellectually unfit for office and accuse him of having engaged in a “coverup.” On the other hand, they march to the White House and insist that he work with them on potentially shared objectives. You and I wouldn’t sit in the same room with people who thought so poorly of us; why should he?

There’s a method to the Democratic madness, however. Tempting Trump into legislative negotiations takes the spotlight off the ongoing attempts to remove him from office and give them the veneer of working “for the people,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. When Trump meets with them under these circumstances, he gives moral legitimacy to their claims. There is absolutely no reason he should do that.

Instead, he should keep a laser-like focus on the American swing voter. That person is the person who tells pollsters they don’t approve of his job performance overall, but do approve of his performance on the economy and disapprove of impeachment. That group is small — averaging about 5 percent of registered voters in the polls — but it’s the group that will determine who wins in 2020. If Trump could get between a quarter and half of that group to change their minds about him overall, he would become the favorite in 2020, no matter who the Democrats nominate.

These voters also want politicians to focus more on doing their jobs and addressing the country’s problems. The most recent Monmouth poll gave Trump only a 41 percent job approval rating among registered voters, but more than half of all respondents said “Congress should move on to other issues” now that the Mueller investigation is over. That number rises to 55 percent among independents and 57 percent in swing counties that either Trump or Hillary Clinton carried by less than 10 percent in 2016. The Democratic base may not have tired on the endless drumbeat of investigations, but the swing voter clearly has.

Democrats will surely howl that this is unfair, pointing to the Republican investigations into the Obama administration’s actions concerning the Benghazi attack and the Fast and Furious operation. But those investigations were substantively different than these. Those investigations were looking at decisions and actions by the president’s team in the conduct of their public duties. The current investigations have nothing to do with running the country. Instead, they are fishing expeditions for either something personal or a process crime to establish grounds to impeach the president. These are the acts of irreconcilable political enemies, not those of normal political adversaries.

Nor is it unprecedented that impeachment efforts cause substantive bipartisan cooperation to falter. The Clinton administration was working behind the scenes in the late 1990s with congressional Republicans to reform the nation’s entitlement programs as the GOP decided to throw all its eggs into the impeachment basket. Those efforts slowed and were ultimately halted when it became politically impossible for the two sides to come together. Basic issues that could not be delayed, such as passing annual budgets, continued. But not much of consequence was attempted or completed once congressional impeachment reared its ugly head.

Democratic House leaders are caught between a rock and a hard place — between political wisdom that warns against impeachment, and a base and many members who have favored impeachment throughout Trump’s presidency. They’ve tried to dance a political hokey pokey all year, placing one foot in the impeachment corner with their hearings, and taking the other foot out with overtures to the White House. Trump is saying he will no longer dance to their tune, thereby forcing them to choose between impeachment and legislation. It will be revealing to see which option they select.

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Source: Trump was right to walk away from Democrats on infrastructure – The Washington Post