I ran the 400-meter in high school and college, so I know sprinting the first turn doesn’t win the race. Rep. Al Green (D-TX) never learned that. On Sept. 15, he forced his eighth privileged resolution to impeach President Donald Trump onto the House floor. The House tabled it 232 to 147, with 18 Democrats crossing over to kill it and 47 more ducking behind present votes. Green won’t get a ninth try. Texas redistricting cost him his primary in May, so this was his last lap. He ran out of track before the line, same as seven times before.
Here’s my thesis, and I won’t bury it the way Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) buried his vote: This was never a case built on evidence. It was a press release wearing a constitutional costume, and even Green’s own leadership wouldn’t wear it.
Green’s resolution accused the administration of abuse of power over immigration enforcement operations that killed two U.S. citizens this year. Whatever you think of those incidents, impeachment under Article II is a constitutional remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors, not a vehicle for grievance. It requires evidence that the president personally directed, enabled, or covered up unlawful conduct, not just that a federal incident occurred. House Democratic leadership said as much: Impeachment demands a real investigative record, document review, witness testimony, hearings. None of that homework got done here.
Only 147 members voted to keep the resolution alive. Forty-seven, including Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA), voted present instead of taking a side. Present is the legislative equivalent of raising your hand in class, then staring at your shoes when called on. Neil Peart of Rush put it better than any consultant will: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Jeffries and his lieutenants made theirs. Standing next to a doomed resolution would’ve cost more than staying quiet, so they took the exit that claims neither side. A caucus learns what its leaders are made of by what they do, not what they say.
This wasn’t an isolated stumble. It was his eighth attempt at removing an elected president from office. He tried in June 2025 over the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and 128 of his own Democratic colleagues joined Republicans to table it. He tried again that December, over a Trump video telling troops to refuse illegal orders, which Green called a threat to execute lawmakers, and lost 237 to 140. The margin barely moved because the math never favored him. Removing a president requires two-thirds Senate conviction, meaning broad bipartisan agreement on an actual constitutional crime. Green never had either. He had a grievance and a floor privilege, which isn’t the same thing as a case. His own party’s “present” votes are an admission that it was all theatrics.
Here’s my real point, and it has less to do with Green than the party he’s leaving behind. House Democrats spent a Tuesday relitigating a fight their own leadership didn’t want, instead of focusing on grocery prices, mortgage rates, or the border policies that voters rank higher. Milton Friedman used to say you learn what people value by watching how they spend their time, not by reading their press releases. Democratic leadership spent a legislative day on impeachment theater they knew would fail, forced there by a member who won’t be in Congress come January. That’s not strategy. That’s a party filling dead air with the only tune it still knows how to play.
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Green’s defenders would say ignoring a serious grievance signals that some conduct is beyond scrutiny. That’s a fair concern, and the incidents deserve a real accounting through oversight hearings, inspector general review, or the courts. But skipping the investigative process doesn’t vindicate the cause. It just hands the target an easy exit, exactly what happened on the House floor this week.
Vince Lombardi said success comes before work only in the dictionary. Green wanted the payoff of removing a sitting president without doing the work that makes such a case survivable, let alone winnable. He got neither, eight times over, and he’s out of runway. The lesson for the rest of us: Outrage isn’t a governing philosophy, and neither is voting present. Voters in November will be watching which party spent the past two years building a real case for how to run the country, and which one filed paperwork nobody read. My money’s on the former, and I suspect a fair number of Democratic strategists, watching their own leadership duck for cover this week, quietly agree with me.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
