The Problem with Tom Steyer

I can�t start this week�s blog without addressing what I announced on Tuesday night. I owe it to you guys to explain why this is happening. The thought of ending this blog has been in my mind for a while; since March. This was due to me joining the local March For Our Lives team and dedicating myself to organizing that march and other events. As I became more heavily involved in the local political scene, I found myself having less and less time to craft my articles while keeping up with school, my job, and my newborn political career. Since then, I became increasingly entrenched in local politics and I found myself being pulled in multiple directions and spread too thin.

By the middle of June, I knew that I would be ending the blog the week before I went to college. I determined that I would reach a breaking point if I were to keep doing everything that I am doing right now in addition to being a college student. I felt that it would be better to exit before college and do it properly rather than stressfully and pathetically quit sometime down the road with no heads-up or proper farewell.

That�s my explanation. For the next month I am going to invest a lot more time in this blog and end this thing the right way.

This week�s main subject is about a man named Tom Steyer. Steyer is a billionaire Democratic donor whose commercials you have probably seen by now. He�s the guy that is spending millions on his campaign to impeach Donald Trump. He is doing this by going around the country and holding town halls to promote his movement which has accomplished nothing politically even though he has dumped $40 million into it. According to his website, five and a half million people have signed his petition to impeach the President. While impeachment proceedings have nothing to do with public opinion, Steyer is hoping that by bringing awareness to President Trump�s �impeachable offenses� and getting enough people behind him that he will make it a mainstream idea and that members of Congress will act on it.

A picture from one of Steyer's "Need to Impeach" commercials.

The thing is: most of the Democratic leadership is not on board. The idea is way too polarizing, radical, and impossible at the moment considering that the Republicans control both chambers of Congress. It would be a terrible strategy for the Democrats to pursue impeachment in an election year where they are trying to flip numerous Republican-held districts. If a swing voter were to tune into NPR and hear that the Democrats are proposing to hold impeachment proceedings, they probably would start to associate the Democrat running in their district with those Congressional Democrats. The swing voter doesn�t care about impeachment proceedings. He cares about jobs and infrastructure.

Even if the Democrats in Congress are not planning to pursue impeachment any time soon, Steyer is still muddying the waters with his ads that run all of the time and on all kinds of channels. Swing voters will be disillusioned with the Democrats as they continue to see those ads and Republican commentators will use them to argue that the Democrats are out of touch with reality.

Steyer would be easy for the Democratic Party to discard and disassociate from but he has the one thing they need: money. He has invested millions in the DCCC, DSCC, and DNC and in efforts to get young people registered to vote (I applaud him for that last part). They need his money.

He�s like a rose with sharp thorns. You need him in your garden but he scratches and stabs you when you try to tend to him. He is a major donor to the party but he also makes the party look bad to independent voters by promoting ideas they are not behind. He works for and against them.

He is a thorn in their side and may have already caused irreversible damage to the Democrat�s chances this election cycle.

Personally, I do not see a reason to impeach Donald Trump� yet. His comments in Helsinki on Monday do not help his case in the least. The grounds for impeachment exist when the President commits treason, bribery, or is convicted of a high crime or misdemeanor. As of right now, there is not enough confirmed information that points to Trump being guilty of any of those things. His defense of Putin over the intelligence community is borderline treasonous but I do not think it is enough to be considered treason. That�s all for this week.