If there’s a great deal of hope to be had from the last week of American politics, one big reason is that we’ve seen how even the most apparently intractable and foreboding crises can be upended by bold and righteous action. In receipt of strong evidence, via the still-anonymous whistleblower, that Donald Trump tried to bribe and strong arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into drumming up false evidence against Joe Biden and his son, the Democratic House leadership was finally unable to resist long-standing calls to start an impeachment inquiry. In the face of this assertion of power, the White House fumbled, and fumbled some more, as it released the damning summary of the Trump-Zelensky phone call and then the whistleblower complaint itself. The two documents worked in catastrophic synergy, the call summary validating the basic accusations of the complaint. The president and his defenders fell back to their familiar authoritarian responses, telling us that what we could read in plain English was actually the opposite of what the words said, and to attack both the whistleblower, his or her sources, and the Democrats as the real offenders. It was not long before the president was attempting to intimidate the whistleblower and other leakers, and to suggest that execution should be their lot (as many were quick to note, in doing so, the president was adding to his roster of impeachable offenses). Generally speaking, it was possible to see a pattern, witnessed before but perhaps never so dramatically, of the way the president tends to melt down and incriminate himself under pressure.
Of course, it wasn’t simply the sense that Trump and his enablers were on the defensive, but that they were being called to account for horrifying crimes against the United States. This, above all, was why last week brought so many of us a sense of renewed hope: there was a feeling that we can stop this assault on our country. The world suddenly felt a lot more unpredictable, but in a good way. Elected Democrats, like most politicians, crave certainty, and this fundamentally conservative instinct has played a role in keeping them from use of the impeachment power, with its infrequent precedents and unknowable outcome. After all, though it’s powerful, it’s circumscribed by what the Senate chooses to do afterwards; under even the best of circumstances, impeachment is a leap into the unknown. But as Pelosi remarked (I think honestly), the president had left the House Democrats no choice, given the magnitude of the Ukraine scandal and how it goes to the heart of Americans’ ability to elect their leaders.
But now we are at the point of necessary debates about what form impeachment should take — whether narrowly focused on the Ukraine scandal, or more of a kitchen-sink indictment of the president. I am seeing strong arguments from both sides, which seem to boil down to making a case that is clear and easily grasped by the public, versus exposing as much of the president’s malfeasance as possible. Those in favor of the former generally seem to think that time is not on the Democrats’ side, and that they shouldn’t appear to be going on a fishing expedition; those in favor of the latter generally think that the full scope of the president’s malfeasance needs to be made known, and that this broad disclosure of information will ultimately benefit the Democrats.
But what just about all advocates of impeachment seem to be agreed on, whether they say so explicitly or not, and what underlies both sides’ arguments, is that the commonly-understood point of impeachment — that it will lead to a conviction in the Senate, and the president’s removal from office — simply will not happen here, on account of the belief that GOP senators will never turn on Trump in sufficient numbers. This outcome is presented as fact, based on hard-headed political realism. In other words, everyone (at least everyone I have read to date) believes that impeachment has no chance of accomplishing its logical purpose: conviction of the president in the Senate and his removal from office. And so discussions of the nature of impeachment revolve around protecting Congress’ credibility and using impeachment to damage the president with revelations of his wrongdoing, even if these revelations will not result in his removal from office.
But the past week has given us flashes of insight into what a distorting effect this realpolitik view of impeachment’s prospects has had on both the dangers in front of us and how they might be remedied. The Democrats’ decision to pursue an impeachment inquiry has already helped produce damning evidence of the threat that the president poses to American democracy. In this respect, the “it won’t work so why bother?” attitude up to now has proven not only to be self-defeating, but an actual enablement of the existential threat Trump embodies, helping him to keep hidden some of his anti-democratic machinations for this long. The Democrats have basically been saying, “We already know we cannot stop the president, so we should not try to stop him.” Yet, now that they have decided to go through the motions of stopping him, nearly all are still saying, “But of course we know that we can’t actually stop him.” Even those who see impeachment as a way to damage Trump’s power and foil his re-election efforts (which, to be fair, is pretty much all supporters of impeachment) don’t actually think impeachment will lead to his conviction in the Senate.
In this combination of cynicism and political savvy, the Democrats are making the curious error of a too-literal interpretation of impeachment, as if the process and the guidance in the Constitution were all that mattered. Like strict constructionists on the right, they risk mistaking the literal text for the spirit of the thing. The founders didn’t just include the impeachment process as a mechanism for removing a president; the larger message of the power is that some presidents merit removal from office based on the threat they pose to the country. So while a president damaged by an unsuccessful impeachment process is better than an undamaged one, it’s a mistake for the Democrats to view the Senate vote as the only way to end Trump’s reign. Based on the chaos and ineptitude with which the White House has met the early impeachment effort, it’s well within the realm of possibility that an avalanche of damning revelations could force the president to resign, independent of a Senate vote — for example, if further revelations caused the president’s approval rating and support among Republican voters to crash downward. That this is unlikely should not be confused with impossible.
Again, I think the events of the past week should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that our situation is set in stone with totally predictable parameters. If the Democrats truly think Trump is unfit to hold office, shouldn’t they have faith that even some of the president’s current supporters may change their minds? There may be massive amounts of tribalism and propaganda holding together the GOP, but will these really add up to continued unswerving support for a president shown to have committed treasonous crimes, and who responds in an undeniably anti-American and destructive manner? In the face of Republican partisanship, it’s essential that the rest of us keep up the hope that our fellow Americans may yet find limits in their loyalty to a sick and broken man.
I’m also arguing for what I’ll call “impeach it like you mean it” because I’ve so far seen zero discussion of what the Democrats’ next steps would be if they were to impeach Trump for his bribery/collusion/election subversion in the Ukraine scandal, fail to convince two-thirds of the Senate to convict him, and the next day President Trump held a press conference with the Ukrainian president at which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s treasonous war on America. If the president is not removed from office, why should we expect mere impeachment to stop him from continuing to commit crimes against American democracy, including subversion of the 2020 election (which the last week has showed us has been his major preoccupation for months now)? His conversation with Zelensky was literally the day after Mueller’s testimony, when it was made clear the Democrats would not impeach Trump for any of the crimes that Mueller uncovered; why would the result of impeachment without removal be any different in actually encouraging the president’s lawlessness?
The key here is that the crimes of which the Democrats are most likely to impeach Trump — those around the Ukraine scandal — are not just high crimes and misdemeanors, but the highest crimes and misdemeanors imaginable. Though he deserves impeachment and removal from office for a plethora of offenses, actions he’s taken to assure his re-election — to essentially transform the U.S. into a one-party state — are arguably the worst of all. This feels like a particularly damning strike against those arguing for a quick impeachment with the understanding that the Senate will acquit. In that case, we absolutely need to hear the Democrats’ plan for what they’d do in the wake of what Trump would spin as a failed impeachment effort, and likely as a green light for even more aggressively criminal behavior than before.
But advocates of both narrow- and wide-scope impeachment inquiries also have a pressing responsibility to lay out their arguments right now for what impeachment is intended to accomplish in the face of public expectations that it will not result in the president’s removal from office. Nearly every Democrat I’ve talked to over the last week is worried about impeachment because they think it’s not going to remove the president from office, and may strengthen his hand. As I’ve been arguing, I don’t think it’s either logical or politically savvy for the Democrats to pursue impeachment without a real strategy for maximizing the chances that it removes him from office. But short of this, they should be clear with the public about what the intention is, whether it’s to ensure the president doesn’t again commit the specific offenses of which he’s accused, or to make clear to the public that he doesn’t deserve re-election.
Beyond this, as I discussed in my last post, I think Democrats need to be explicit about putting not just Trump but the entire GOP on trial; in particular, they need to be transparent about forcing GOP senators to choose between party and country. Even as Democrats need to appeal to independent and persuadable GOP voters when making the case for Trump’s impeachment, they need to assure their own base that impeachment will move the fight against Trump forward, not only to keep up morale going into 2020, but in the hope that this will build synergy between public pressure and the Democrats’ commitment to the impeachment effort.