Did You Know Schiff Won His 1st House Race Campaigning Against Impeachment?
Rep. Adam Schiff pretty much owns impeachment at this point.
The House Intelligence Committee chairman presided over the first committee to hear accusations against President Donald Trump and also set the tone of the hearings. He broke it, he bought it.
Now, much like his counterpart on the House Judiciary Committee — Rep. Jerrold Nadler — Schiff is coming under fire for his hypocrisy on impeachment, particularly given that he won his first race for the House of Representatives by campaigning against another impeachment.
That impeachment, of course, was against Bill Clinton — a president who everyone agreed had committed perjury.
First running for Congress in California 20 years ago, Schiff used frustration over impeachment against his opponent, incumbent Republican Rep. James Rogan.
“I think impeachment for most people in this district is only the most graphic illustration of an incumbent who has put the national partisan, ideological fights ahead of representing his district,” then-state Sen. Schiff told NBC back then, as Fox News reported.
“People want to decide this on the basis of who’s going to serve our community.”
Although he ran on impeachment, he didn’t want people to think that’s what he was running on.
“Jim Rogan is in trouble for reasons that have nothing to do with impeachment,” he told The Boston Globe in 1999.
“I think a lot of people are unhappy that Jim Rogan has ignored the district for five years.”
Meanwhile, here’s Schiff now:
Yeah, no change from then to now, when he’s saying that free and fair elections in 2020 depend on the president being impeached.
Back in 2000, meanwhile, Schiff made impeachment of Clinton an issue in what was then the most expensive House race in American history.
As The Washington Post pointed out at the time, “Schiff’s campaign literature hammers away on Rogan’s role in the impeachment proceedings” and argued “that Rogan is too wrapped in the partisan politics of Washington.”
According to The Daily Caller News Foundation, another article said Schiff argued that “in the partisan impeachment hearings that polarized our nation for so long, the right-wing Rogan stood out.”
Schiff, in other words, ran on the fact that impeachment of a president who had lied under oath wasn’t called for, but now believes that impeaching Trump is.
“Adam Schiff is a total hypocrite,” Eric Early, one of Schiff’s GOP challengers in 2020, told Fox.
“He first ran for Congress opposing impeachment and saying he would fix problems in the district. Now, two decades of completely abandoning our district later, Schiff thinks this impeachment outrage is a good idea, and he still hasn’t fixed a single problem in the district.”
Yes, but here’s the thing: It depends on what the impeachment can do for Adam Schiff.
In 2000, he ran against impeachment because it made news.
He’s now the chairman of the powerful House Intelligence Committee — which puts him at the fore of the impeachment debate. He believes the case against Trump rises to impeachment even though there’s been no independent counsel recommending crimes, no significant impeachment inquiry and no fair process.
In short, impeachment is a very useful tool for him. He’s going to wield it as such. Don’t expect him to notice how differently he’s using it.
Like Jerrold Nadler, who railed against party-line impeachment votes and said the “effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters” when it involved Clinton, he’s not going to develop a sense of shame — even if it’s how Schiff got elected to the House in the first place.
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