Nancy Pelosi’s comments yesterday on impeachment were exactly right.
First, here is what she said:
"I'm not for impeachment. This is news. I'm going to give you some news right now because I haven't said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I've been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it."
My key assumption that the goal is to remove Trump from office as quickly as possible. What is the fastest way to get from Point (where we are today) to Point B (a world in which Trump is no longer President)?
Trump has already committed—in public—the impeachable act of obstructing an investigation of him and his campaign.
Members of the House and Senate took an oath to uphold the Constitution, which says that a President who has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” can be impeached by a simple majority vote of the House and removed from office by a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate. Many Democratic members of Congress feel, understandably, that no American is above the law and that they would not be upholding their oath of office if they did not file impeachment charges against a President who is clearly a criminal.
Impeachment and removal from office is not a legal process, despite the fact that the final stage in the Senate is called “a trial.” It is a political process. It has nothing to do with criminal charges. If the 2/3 of the Senate votes to convict the President, he or she is removed from office. Whether the President is indicted later on criminal charges is up to the justice system.
The Democratic-controlled House has the justification and the votes today to draw up articles of impeachment, approve them, and send Trump to the Senate for trial.
Given what we know today about Trump’s many crimes, would the filing of impeachment charges in the House and a trial in the Senate get us to our goal—to Point B?
The answer is, absolutely, “no.”
Anyone who thinks that two thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would convict Trump based on the current, considerable evidence of his crimes has been living on some other planet. TWENTY Republican Senators would have to vote to convict Trump. The GOP senators will only turn against Trump if their base voters in their home state turn against Trump, because they have to survive a Republican primary in order to get reelected. Over 85 percent of Republicans currently support Trump. Conviction in the Senate will not happen.
Given that an impeachment undertaken based on current knowledge will not succeed, what would such an effort accomplish?
• Impeachment would formalize the struggle between Trump partisans and the anti-Trump into an all-out war.
• Impeachment would completely overwhelm the Democratic agenda in Congress. Even though there is no chance of Democratic bills being signed into law during Trump’s term, passing a series a bills in the House is vitally important to retaining Democratic control of that chamber in 2020 because Republicans will be forced to defend their votes during the campaign.
• Democrats in Congress would be able to say that they fulfilled their Constitutional duty.
• Impeachment would be viewed by many in the anti-Trump resistance as a positive move.
• Impeachment would ignite the Trump base, who will feel that the Democrats are trying to overturn the results if the 2016 election.
• Impeachment without conviction would be the ultimate proof that Congress is utterly partisan and irretrievably broken.
• Impeachment without conviction will enable Trump to claim a huge victory against the partisan Democrats and against the investigations into him just before the 2020 election.
• Impeachment without conviction will increase GOP fundraising and voter turnout in the 2020 election, increasing the chances that Trump will be reelected to a second term.
Which brings us to Pelosi’s important caveat—that impeachment would be inevitable if the majority of Americans and Republicans turn against the President. People forget that Nixon was only impeached because he was caught on tape, and the America of 1973 was not as divided on partisan lines as the America of today. I don’t believe that the GOP will ever support Trump’s removal, no matter what he has done or how many guns are smoking.
Pelosi is being very deliberate and smart about her announcement. She made it clear that the door to impeachment is not totally closed. She made her comments prior to the release of the Mueller report to make her preferences clear beforehand. She is right that impeachment without the support if the majority of Americans will hurt the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections. She is taking responsibility as the leader of her caucus for not supporting impeachment at this time in part to allow individual Democratic members of Congress to endorse impeachment if they want to do so. She has the support of Adam Schiff and Gerry Nadler, the Democratic chairmen of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, who are in the process of uncovering the truth about the Trump family crime organization between now and the election.
The best way to remove Trump is to beat him at the polls next year. An attempt to impeach him would only make him a martyr to his supporters and give a new lease on life to his fascist movement. The hard truth—and it’s a very hard truth indeed—is not only that impeachment is doomed in this Congress, it could help to utterly destroy the American experiment by giving another four-year term to a racist, fascist, anti-American President. The 2020 election is the only way to way to get to Point B, and we won’t be successful in that journey if we try to focus on both that contest and impeachment.