The political arguments for impeachment are very strong
by digby
Former Harry Reid staffer Adam Jentleson explains in this excellent GQ essay that the Democrats were complacent about the Garland nomination, assuming that Clinton would be elected and everything would work out. We know what happened. And he thinks the Democrats are making the same mistake now.
The second lesson from the Garland experience is that like nature, power abhors a vacuum. The decision not to impeach is not a decision to focus on other things, it is a decision to cede power, control, and legitimacy to Trump. Trump is not a master chess player, he just bluffs his opponents into forfeiting their moves—and that is exactly what he is doing to House Democrats.
For their part, House Democrats have argued that by foregoing impeachment they can shift the conversation to topics their consultants tell them are safer ground, like health care. That’s not going to happen. Reporters cover news, and only events that drive news can shift the message. House Democrats are understandably proud of having run and won on health care in the 2018 midterms. But their campaign messages were buoyed by a constant flood of major health care news coming out of Washington, DC, driven by the very real threat that Republicans would repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act. But since Democrats took back the House, that’s not going to happen. This is a good thing, but it severely limits Democrats’ ability to drive news on health care. Passing bills in the House that are guaranteed to go nowhere in McConnell’s Senate, as House Democrats recently did with bills to strengthen Obamacare and lower drug prices, will not drive a message.
The void that House Democrats are ceding to Trump is the space between now and election day. Filling that space with easy messages like health care is not a viable option. And a good rule of thumb of politics is that if you have the power to do something that hurts your opponent, you should do it.
Impeachment is a long process that will highlight Trump’s crimes, which according to (literally) one thousand former federal prosecutors, include “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Imagine the Michael Cohen, James Comey, or William Barr hearings but on steroids, for many weeks. Anything can happen and hearings can go haywire, but the odds of making a convincing public case against Trump are stacked strongly in Democrats’ favor. Trump’s crimes are serious and laid out in meticulous detail by an unimpeachable source. The public already believes he committed serious crimes by a margin of two to one. There is already a loud chorus decrying Trump’s crimes and arguing that he should be impeached, ranging from Kellyanne Conway’s husband to a sitting Republican Congressman. In this case, the impeachment process is like one of those meals where all the ingredients come in a box: you have to boil some water and maybe crack an egg, but it’s basically idiot-proof.
If and when the House votes to impeach, the ball goes to the Senate. The Senate can ignore it, which means the House’s impeachment is the last word. That would be fine. But McConnell would be under enormous pressure from Trump and the entire right-wing echosphere to call a Kangaroo court into session for the purpose of letting Trump off. If the Senate conducts a trial, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2020—like Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner—will have to decide whether to vote to remove from office a President who has been shown to have committed serious crimes, or protect him. They will likely vote to protect Trump and it will cost them: they will have to explain which of Trump’s many crimes they think are no big deal, why they disagree with the many voices from their own party saying his crimes make him unfit, and why a criminal president should be allowed to continue in office.
More importantly, if the public believes Trump is guilty but the Senate lets him off anyway, he won’t ever be truly exonerated—he’ll be O.J. Simpson, assumed guilty but sprung by allies and circumstance. Some Democrats have argued that we should skip impeachment and vote Trump out instead. But if the House impeaches Trump and Senate Republicans fall in line to protect him, the argument that the ballot is the only way to remove him will be supercharged.
By contrast, declining to impeach Trump validates his claim that Mueller exonerated him. At a Grand Rapids town hall held by Michigan’s Justin Amash, the lone Republican Congressman who has come out for impeachment, an attendee was confused by Amash’s position until hearing him lay out the case for an inquiry. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before,” she told NBC. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.” People will not know what Trump did wrong if Democrats don’t tell them.
Even more ominously, Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice under Barr, who has shown himself to be Trump’s eager and obedient partner in abusing the power of the state to advance the president’s political interests, will inevitably invent a pretext for investigating the Democratic nominee. Democrats should consider whether they’d rather engage that fight against a president who has been impeached for serious crimes, or against a president strengthened by the de facto exoneration bestowed when his opponents declined to pursue the evidence against him.
It is a long way from June 2019 to November 2020. And as they say in Boston, you can’t get there from here. Hoping everything turns out well while giving Trump free space to wield his power is unlikely to end well.
The fight will be hard for House Democrats and the appeal of dodging it is strong. But like the monsters in “It Follows,” this fight will find you. It already has.
I know that it’s hard to believe this incompetent 40% boob can win re-election. But it was impossible to believe that he could win the first time. Now he has the power of incumbency and the whole party of eager toadies behind him working feverishly to suppress the vote and welcome more foreign interference with open arms.
Impeachment is a risk the Democrats must take. Playing it safe has not worked out — they just keep seizing more power and becoming more and more extreme. The Democrats have to stop assuming they will win by default.
BTW: I wrote about the OJ Simpson comparison last week. Trump knew OJ. They were friends.
He does not want to be OJ.