I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite political columnists this week, and among other things have been reminded why Brian Beutler is on my essential reading list for comprehending our extreme times. In "Don't Absolve Trump of His Impeachable Offenses," he picks apart the contradictions and assumptions in both parties’ views of impeaching President Trump. Citing how the GOP is talking up an impeachment threat should Democrats win back Congress, he points out how this approach is abetted by the Democrats’ “muddled” positions on this question. Beutler argues that Democrats who say impeachment talk is premature absent a firm case emerging out of the Mueller investigation ignore the way Trump’s continued ties to his business make him unfit to be president, for a variety of reasons ranging from his susceptibility to blackmail to his use of government for personal financial benefit; that is, grounds for impeachment don’t rest on Russian collusion alone. He continues:
But even in absence of a Russia scandal, Trump’s business empire (to say nothing of his autocratic tendencies and incompetent management) would be a burning crisis. Democrats wouldn’t be “normalizing” the abuse of the impeachment power by deploying it against Trump. Their refusal to acknowledge Trump’s basic incompatibility with high office is instead normalizing the idea that corrupt businessmen can use the presidency to enrich themselves at the expense of the public [. . .]
The fact that impeachment may not be practicable [. . .] has no bearing on the normative question of whether Trump deserves to be impeached, or on whether Democrats and liberals should try to persuade people that he does. The answer to those questions is obvious.
The way Beutler turns the question of normalizing impeachment around to the question of normalizing Trump’s corruption is an extremely helpful way to both think about impeachment and why it’s a reasonable measure for discussion. Being explicit about the high costs of the Trump presidency to our system of governance rightly puts the spotlight on those real harms occurring on a daily basis, and contextualizes talk of what would otherwise seem an extreme remedy. Beutler’s separation of the practicability of impeachment from the question of whether there are actually grounds likewise helps us see our situation more clearly.
Beutler goes on to write:
It is completely reasonable for Democrats to weigh the political costs of acknowledging or dwelling on Trump’s obvious unfitness for office. But it’s also a mistake in both the near and long term to pretend the obvious doesn’t exist. It’s a dangerous thing—for people and for the institutions that make the country governable—that Trump is president. The fact that he won’t divest himself from his businesses, won’t stop mingling his public duties and his financial interests, and also won’t say whom he owes money to, or who could otherwise ruin him financially, is an affront to all citizens, and a national security emergency. [. . .]
Those who are scared that any impeachment buzz in the air will hurt Democrats politically ought to say so, but without absolving Trump of all the impeachable depravities he’s engaged in before our eyes.
For me, this final paragraph catalyzed an insight that hovers over the whole article: impeachment is a conundrum for Democrats in part because it requires them to argue they are acting in the national interest — to confront a “national emergency,” in Beutler’s phrasing — while inevitably also acting in a partisan manner, in that impeachment means acting against a president from the opposite party. This is a contradiction that the GOP exploits when it points to the impeachment threat as a reason to vote for Republicans — that the Democrats want to remove Trump because he’s their political nemesis, not because he’s committed impeachable acts. (Though, as Beutler points out, this puts Republicans in the unenviable position of defending his actual impeachable behavior — a difficult situation somewhat analogous to the danger to the Democrats of not opposing Trump sufficiently.)
Putting aside the impeachment question for a moment, this same tension underlies the broader debate over the political cost to Democrats of putting opposition to Trump and a focus on his malfeasance at the center of the party’s agenda: they may claim to be acting in the national interest, and may objectively speaking actually be acting in the national interest through opposition to the president, but this does not mean that the broader public supports such a focus — as opposed to, for instance, the Democrats downplaying opposition to the president and fighting for a concrete, positive vision of their own.
Under normal circumstances, opposing the other party and advocating your own positions are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re the regular substance of politics. The reason there is a question, and anxiety, about the Democrats defining themselves primarily by their opposition to Trump isn’t necessarily due to flaws in the party, but because for so many Democrats, Trump merits implacable and virulent opposition. The question of impeachment is the logical extension of a conclusion that he’s done and said things that merit removal from office.
So I see a second tension here: the existence of a president who deserves impeachment also means that the opposition party must to some greater or lesser extent necessarily subordinate its identity and partisan goals to this one overriding objective. You could say that the seriousness of the situation requires that the balance between advocacy and opposition requires a shift in favor of opposition. But going back to the first tension I identified, though, this puts the Democrats in a bind, since our two-party system means that impeachment will inevitably assume a partisan cast, even as the Democrats could persuasively argue that they’re serving a broader national interest. The largely single-minded mode a party seeking impeachment must embrace will perversely make them seem even more partisan in their motivations.
The basic danger and fear — which I think is pretty broadly clear to anyone involved in Democratic politics, wherever they come down on how to proceed — is that Democrats will be identified with an oppositional stance simply for partisanship’s sake rather than a party fighting for a concrete agenda that will help Americans, and in doing so will sink their chances of either stopping Trump or accomplishing any of their positive party goals. But I would argue that if Donald Trump truly merits full and unremitting opposition, up to and including impeachment — and I believe he does — then Democrats need to fully acknowledge and navigate the inevitable tensions I’ve identified.
If there is an ineluctable partisan dimension to such opposition in a two-party system, then Democrats are either going to need to figure out how to minimize this perception of partisanship, or how to explain it in a way that upends easy dismissal of their actions as simply “partisan.” Likewise, if there is an inevitable danger in Democrats subordinating their positive party goals to the emergency of removing a president from office, Democrats need to figure out how to minimize the risks on this front as well.
In our highly-polarized political environment, these are incredibly difficult tensions to navigate. In fact, a signature danger of our time is that a president clearly unfit to serve is protected both by a seemingly unshakeable base of support, and by an overall atmosphere in which arguing for a larger national interest is seen by many as suspect. Yet, just as Beutler points out that failure to pursue impeachment equates to essentially normalizing impeachable presidential behavior, one could argue that Democrats’ failure to fully oppose Donald Trump’s impeachable behavior, rather than insulating them from unpredictable political downsides, actually carries its own toxic downside for Democrats: of normalizing not just a president, but a form of politics, deeply inimical to their core beliefs and goals.
Beutler argues that Trump’s failure to separate himself from his business is grounds for impeachment; but I would argue that beyond this, Donald Trump has engaged in an array of behaviors and actions that, while no single one might merit impeachment, together constitute a self-inflicted indictment of the man’s unfitness for office. From calling a free press “the enemy of the people,” to a restriction on immigration that quite clearly singled out Muslims, to his coddling of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, to his failure to protect the United States from future Russian election interference, to his accusations that the Justice Department and FBI are broken and not to be trusted, to his lies that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton and that we can’t trust our own elections, Trump has proved himself to be an illiberal autocrat fundamentally opposed to American democracy.
The question of whether Democrats should seek Donald Trump’s removal from office only has one answer. The question, then, is how to navigate the treacherous terrain of seeking this goal. Somewhat paradoxically, the depth and depravity of Donald Trump’s offenses against American democracy, and his attempts to stoke, not allay, partisan divisions, arguably have opened a path forward for a stance of full opposition by the Democrats. In a two-party system, impeachment will inevitably assume some degree of partisan cast. However, because Donald Trump’s offenses go to heart of our democratic system, the Democrats have a clear opportunity to make the case that their partisan identity is inextricably linked to their commitment to basic American democratic values. In fact, I’d argue that it’s become both a necessity for Democrats to double-down on this commitment, and to insist on it as a key part of what the party stands for. These are basic values that most Americas agree with: The rule of law. One person, one vote. No special treatment for the wealthy. No person is above the law. There is no basic tenet of American democracy that Donald Trump has not run afoul of; in this, there is a path forward for Democrats to neutralize inevitable accusations of partisanship in their fight to end this presidency.
As to the question of the price Democrats will pay for emphasizing opposition over engagement: it seems to me that here, too, the path forward is to embrace partisanship in a creative and canny fashion. They should keep making make the case that they are serving the national interest; but also assert that Democrats don’t simply oppose Donald Trump, but advocate for an entirely different way of doing things, in terms of both democratic process and legislative substance. They should embrace a traditional American way of politics that actually believes in democracy and equality, while also reminding voters of what legislation they would work to pass. This will energize Democrats who want more than just opposition to Trump, and inspire other voters who want the country to move forward. Democrats must paint Trump and the GOP as anti-democratic forces standing in the way of progress that the majority wants to see, and must emphasize and describe as much as possible what they will aim to get done once Trump is removed from office and the GOP is defeated. The agenda necessarily will include both measures to strengthen our democracy — both in terms of voter registration, anti-gerrymandering measures and the like, as well as strengthened defenses against hacking — but also promises to pass items like real infrastructure legislation, immigration reform, and a tax bill that moves some of the obscene cuts to the top 1% into the pockets of middle- and working-class Americans. In other words, Democrats need to both defend democracy on principle, and demonstrate, through a concrete agenda, how democratic action delivers concrete benefits to the American people that in turn strengthen the public good.
This strategy is key in light of another factor we need to consider when talking about opposing Trump: the GOP’s decision to protect the president from his malfeasance, in the name of short-term party gains like the recently-passed tax bill. The broader picture is that it’s not just Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole, that has increasingly turned to an anti-democratic agenda, from voting restrictions, to tax cuts that primarily benefit the richest among us, to gerrymandering that strikes at the heart of representative democracy. Any strategy for opposing Donald Trump needs to implicitly or explicitly involve an indictment of the GOP as a whole; to treat Trump as an isolated issue would be to treat the symptom but not the disease. Democrats needs to push for common-sense laws in defense of basic democratic processes that the GOP will not support, in order both to protect our form of government and to help expose the authoritarian direction of the Republican Party.
One obvious rejoinder is that while this approach might win Democrats enough votes to take the House and impeach Donald Trump, it’s impossible to win enough Senate seats in 2018 to convict and remove the president from office; in fact, this “partisanship-forward” approach, to coin a phrase, would likely mean Republican senators would be more opposed than ever to removing a president from their own party. True enough; but I would reply that there seems to be no possible scenario in which most Republican senators would vote to remove the president. But impeaching the president, and forcing GOP members of the House to defend him, would set Democrats up for significant victories in 2020, both in the presidential election and in Senate races in which many Republicans would be forced to defend their votes to retain a corrupt president, who at that point would be up for re-election and exerting a serious drag on GOP prospects.
A couple final thoughts on impeachment and its discontents. First, I think Democrats would do well to recognize that in times that feel so fraught and destabilized, talk of impeachment can feel like part of the problem, rather than part of its solution. If they’re going to pursue impeachment, they need to be sure to frame it as the constitutional remedy for a situation like we now face. Second, we need to remember that the discussion around impeachment is a process, and that the primary ingredient is making the case regarding Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. At a minimum, such an argument will strengthen Democrats’ prospects in the mid-term elections and in 2020 — particularly if it is combined with a broader indictment of the GOP for its authoritarian inclinations and the Democrats' assertion of themselves as the party that defends both the constitutional order and the American Dream.
