To Impeach or Not to Impeach

This is the question that has pushed to the fore in the wake of the release of the (redacted) Mueller Report last week.  Given the array of presidential misconduct described in the Report, the question has given rise to more debate than one might have expected.

The impeachment question does not arise for Congressional Republicans.  As with all of the President’s misconduct since he took office, they are largely silent.  Only Senator Mitt Romney has condemned the President’s and his campaign’s behavior after reading the Mueller Report.  But he misread it to say that Mueller found insufficient evidence to bring charges against the President.  That is not the case.  Instead, Mueller decided not to reach conclusions about whether obstruction crimes had been committed because of the Department of Justice’s policy not to indict sitting presidents for crimes.

If it took up the impeachment process, it is likely that the Democratic Party-controlled House would vote to charge the President with impeachable crimes.  But there is no question that the Republican-controlled Senate would not convict the President in the subsequent impeachment trial for the offenses charged.  Hence the House Democrats’ dilemma about charging Trump with those offenses.  The practical outcome would be that the President remains in office, and in a more vindictive mood yet.

In addition, Democrats in moderate states and congressional districts worry that impeaching the President will inflame his base of fervent supporters and jeopardize their re-election prospects.  The historical reference is to the 1998-99 impeachment by House Republicans of President Bill Clinton, in the midst of which Democrats gained seats in Congress in the 1998 midterm elections and the President’s job approval ratings went up even as the Republicans charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky.  (Ultimately the Senate did not convict Clinton of the charges.)

My conclusion is that Democratic reservations in the impeachment matter are unwarranted on both moral and realpolitik grounds.  The House should initiate impeachment proceedings regardless of the prospects for the case in the Senate.

An ancient aphorism asserts that silence is assent.  In the face of moral offenses, silence implicitly condones them.  Now Congressional Democrats have been anything but silent since the release of the Mueller Report.  They have roundly condemned the President’s misconduct.  But given the scale of that misconduct, statements to the media amount to little more than hushed whispers of criticism in the face of real calamity.  What is required is a response proportionate to the high immorality and deep threat of this president’s conduct.

Since taking office the President has mounted an unprecedented assault on the institutions of our democracy and the Western world order.  His real rap sheet ranges from regular attacks on the democratic rule of law–attacking the judiciary, law enforcement and the special counsel’s investigation with lies–to taking the word of world leaders antagonistic to American interests over that of his own national security establishment (e.g., Vladimir Putin in Helsinki), to intentionally using racial animus to stereotype immigrants and to praise white nationalists, and–yes–to committing what are likely obstruction crimes as detailed in the Mueller Report.

This ceaseless attack on our institutions morally requires a proportionate response from our institutions of governance.  It requires a formal statement by our lawmaking authorities that the President’s illegal and anti-democratic behavior cannot and will not stand.  The House of Representatives, at least, must counter the existential threat to American democracy with a response of equal force in order to preserve it.  Voting articles of impeachment is the only way to reassert the primacy of the rule of law in America, to demonstrate that no one is above or beyond the law.

I am unpersuaded by the pragmatist argument that impeachment by the House risks some sort of ‘revolt’ by Trump’s fervent supporters that will re-elect him and cost Democrats seats in Congress.  This argument makes two important and related errors: that the political dynamics around the Clinton impeachment related to sexual misconduct are the same as those surrounding the most anti-democratic, demagogic and rule-breaking president in U.S. history, and that the Trump base will grow should the House dare to impeach him.

Opinion polls around the 2018 midterm elections consistently indicated that his failsafe base lies somewhere between 28 and 35 percent of likely voters.  The polling also found that while 32 percent of likely voters said they would definitely vote to re-elect Trump, an average of 42 percent said they would definitely vote to elect someone else.  A carefully constructed and managed impeachment effort is unlikely to push the less committed voters disproportionately in Trump’s direction and bring his re-election.  The same should hold for moderate Congressional districts.

Our elected legislators have long told us that the question of action against this president must await the Mueller Report.  That time has come, and the answer is clear.  To fail to initiate impeachment proceedings is to reinforce and reproduce the President’s disdain for law and the American Constitution.