By some measures, the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry would seem to be fated for failure, if the end goal is to remove the president from office via a two-thirds votes in the Senate. A CNN poll out a few days ago shows the same percentage of respondents backing the president’s removal as a month ago, even after hearings that included numerous damning details as to the president’s unfitness for office. Crucially, not a single Republican senator has voiced willingness to countenance the president’s removal from office.
Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear new revelations of the crooked dealings of Donald Trump and his cronies. In the last few days, there have been two particularly important ones. First, we’ve learned that the president was aware of the whistleblower complaint that ended up sparking the impeachment effort well before he released the Ukrainian aid that had been held back under his orders. The importance here is that it hardens our understanding that Trump reversed his hold on the funds because he knew his corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election had been exposed; as numerous observers have put it, “he got caught.” Second, Donald Trump has begun to deny that Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer and second only to the president in the Ukraine extortion scheme, ever did anything Ukraine-related at his orders, an assertion belied by enormous amounts of evidence.
While neither of these recent developments may seem game-changing in and of itself, they demonstrate two basic realities of the impeachment inquiry that argue for keeping the investigation going rather than prematurely wrapping it up. The fact that new evidence badly undercutting the president’s lies and misdirection is burbling up on a daily basis means that, as a matter of basic logic, it would be silly to end the fact-finding phase in the next couple weeks. If we were talking about insignificant details, that would be one thing — but that the president only released the aid because he had been caught is a major blow to his defense, and we should have a decent amount of confidence that more such revelations will arrive in coming days.
The other fundamental these examples show is that the president is being forced by the weight of the facts to make increasingly implausible assertions to defend his innocence. Yes, he lies all the time — but now his lies are reaching a point of absurdity. If he now finds he must deny any connection to Rudy Giuliani — a falsehood contradicted by his own prior words — then we must count this as a win for the impeachment process. There is little risk and great upside to Democrats to push him further and further into such tremendous contradictions.
Continuing to squeeze out vital information and pushing the president to further contradict and undermine himself are two compelling reasons to not let up on the investigatory phase of the impeachment inquiry. But there’s a third reason related to both of these: the impeachment process is getting under Trump’s skin, making him more unhinged than ever, and, I believe, making him prone to more unforced errors that can further the impeachment case against him. Even if removal from office is unlikely, clearing a path for him to inflict serious political damage on himself through rash and self-defeating maneuvers has at least some hope of limiting his power and scope of maneuver in a post-impeachment Washington.
Which gets us to what may be the overriding reason to keep impeachment going for a whole lot longer: if and when this process fails to remove the president from office, only the most deluded would think that the president won’t redouble his lawless efforts to undermine the 2020 election. After all, this is a man who personally pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son the very next day after the Mueller hearings ended, when it was clear that the Democrats had failed in their effort to hold Trump accountable for his collusion with Russian in the 2016 election. If it’s 99% certain the Senate will never convict Trump, due to GOP senators refusing to put country over party, then impeachment’s purpose must be to debilitate the president to the maximum extent possible.
This is also a powerful argument for expanding the scope of the impeachment inquiry, preferably to include the related territory of Trump’s self-enrichment through benefitting his personal businesses via the power of the presidency. That there is really not a single area of policy where we can trust that he has made decisions in the nation’s interest rather than in his personal interest is the key corruption of this presidency. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write in To End a Presidency, their timely treatise on the impeachment power, establishing a pattern of bad behavior is a legitimate and sometimes necessary approach to capturing the true scope of a chief executive’s malfeasance. This seems an accurate prescription for our present situation.
Months ago, I read somewhere that the Democrats should pursue impeachment at least to demonstrate that even impeachment has been broken by our current political state, as a sort of existentially clarifying maneuver. This felt chilling and true at the time, and perhaps even more so now that the process is underway and we see how the GOP strategy is not so much to refute the facts as to convince us that the facts either don’t exist or are the opposite of what they are. But if impeachment cannot function as the founders exactly intended, on account of the corruption of the president’s own party holding the crucial balance of power in the Senate, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats cannot try to deploy it in the spirit in which it was designed: to stop a chief executive who poses an existential threat to the constitutional order.
And when that chief executive is aided and abetted by the lockstep unity of his fellow party members in Congress, in ways foreseen but feared by the architects of the constitution, then the Democrats act in the national interest to the extent they are able to use impeachment not just as a weapon against the president, but as a tool to expose and publicize the truth about his co-conspirators in the GOP. The capacity to use impeachment creatively in defense of our democratic order is at a maximum so long as investigations are still underway in the House. Once the process moves to the Senate, Mitch McConnell will not skip a beat in turning the trial phase into a war on Democrats. The Democrats will be failing the country, and kneecapping themselves, if they don’t use their time of peak power to full advantage, or adjust the impeachment process to reflect the very slim likelihood of actually removing the president.