The Democrats' futile attacks on Trump's sex life

Democrats have decided their best shot at bringing President Trump down is to focus on his sex life.

Yes, they really are that dumb.

The Washington Post on Monday reported that congressional Democrats are planning "a major investigative focus" on Trump's alleged pre-presidential affairs, having decided that the public evidence he paid two women hush money during the 2016 campaign makes the matter easy pickings for their investigators.

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"The fingerprints are all over this one — it's not like a big mystery," said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Democrats are right to reach for low-hanging fruit — Al Capone didn't go to prison for rum-running, after all, but for tax evasion. And Trump really does appear to have committed an election law crime by orchestrating payments to these women — one hesitates to call them "former lovers" — and he, like his disgraced former lawyer Michael Cohen, should pay a penalty for doing so.

That said, it's possible Democrats have chosen the dumbest possible route to removing the president from office.

Here are at least three better reasons to impeach Trump:

The galling truth is that Democrats have tiptoed around the idea of impeachment for more than two years because they feared repeating the GOP disaster of the late 1990s, when that party was punished by voters after impeaching Bill Clinton over his sex life. Now, they've decided to take the path they said they most feared. This does not make sense.

For one thing, it's arguable that Trump's sex life has already been litigated by voters. He was a known philanderer in November 2016 — he'd made a career, in part, by bragging to the New York Post and Howard Stern about it — and a sufficient number of voters decided that didn't matter enough to keep him out of office. That stinks, but it's true. And Democrats have spent a generation laying the groundwork for this effort to fail, by complaining for 20 years about the frivolousness of the GOP's 1990s impeachment effort.

It's easy to understand why Democrats would choose this route. Sex is easy. Sex commands headlines. Who wants to explain to the public the ins-and-outs of, say, the Emoluments Clause? And it's true that Trump's behavior in the matter was shady and, based on the fact his lawyer is now sitting in prison for it, very likely illegal. But we've seen this movie before. Democrats were always going to have a tough time "winning" impeachment, thanks to GOP control of the Senate. It appears they're choosing the worst possible path — one that leaves Trump in office while diminishing their own standing with the public. That is not noble. It is just dumb.