Even though Trump has clearly committed dozens of impeachable offenses, I have argued for months against impeachment because of five undeniable realities:
· It will never succeed in this Congress
· It will give him yet another huge political victory just before the election
· It will only succeed in inflaming his base and increasing his fundraising
· It will suck up all the Democratic House’s energy and resources
· Impeachment without the support of the vast majority of Americans is a really, really lousy idea
· Elections have consequences and Trumpism is best removed by the ballot box and not through impeachment
· It encourages dangerously delusional political thinking by catereing to the most absurd and impossible fantasies of the resistance (e.g., impeachment has a chance of succeeding, Republicans will turn against Trump, impeachment hearings will change voters’ minds about Trump, impeachment will force Trump to resign) when we should be focusing on the election.
The argument in favor of impeachment that totally resonates with me, however, is another undeniable reality: that if Congress does not impeach Trump after his multiple impeachable offenses, it will not have upheld its Constitutional responsibility. In other words, if Congress and the Democratic Party won’t impeach someone like Trump, why do we even have a Congress or a Democratic Party?
Until this week I felt strongly that the realpolitik realities listed above outweighed this argument. But now we have Bill Barr.
I’m ashamed (heartily) to admit that I actually stated last month that the country was lucky to have Bill Barr in place as Attorney General before Mueller completed his investigation and submitted his report. I thought that because Matt Whitaker was a dangerous moron who would torpedo the Mueller finale; Barr was not stupid enough to commit a crime under Trump’s spell; Democrats and former Justice Department colleagues swore that Barr, although a conservative, was a staunch institutionalist; and Barr had a thirty-year personal relationship with Robert Mueller.
I couldn’t have been more catastrophically wrong. We now know that what we have in Barr is an Attorney General who is smart and politically savvy (he may be the only person in Trump’s administration who fits that description), completely dedicated to protecting any President from the law in any situation, thoroughly comfortable with a perpetual war with Congressional Democrats, and an aggressive advocate for the legality of Trump’s savage agenda (demolishing the Affordable Care Act, putting immigrants in concentration camps, suppressing the Democratic vote, etc., etc.). Barr is quickly usurping Trump’s standing as the most dangerous force for evil in the country.
Trumpland has no bottom, and this latest horror has got me thinking again about the how fundamental the rule of law is to any kind of civilized society. But it hasn’t led me to believe that any of my arguments against impeachment were invalid or mistaken, or that the 2020 election is the existential political event in the history of the United States. Millions of us share this feeling. We must have room for both. Doing the right thing—impeaching Trump—cannot mean that we fall into another GOP political trap.
Holding months of impeachment hearings would certainly give vast media coverage of Trump’s crimes, coverage that could be very powerful if it came in the form of public testimony from Trump insiders like former White House counsel Don McGahn. But we’ve had two years of this coverage. At this point, in this polarized country, very few votes would be changed. The Mueller report was a pretty savage indictment of Trump’s behavior, and it hardly registered in the poll. And months of hearings would consume vast reservoirs of Democratic and resistance focus and energy that should be spent on recruiting great candidates, executing on voter-registration efforts, and passing legislation in the House on nonpartisan issues that voters really care about and where Trump and the GOP are literally nowhere: health care, the environment, immigration, common-sense gun control, and infrastructure. Such legislation would be just as doomed in the Senate as impeachment, but it would force the Republicans to vote against these bills and allow the Democrats to use those votes against them in 2020.
There is a viable middle ground between a doomed impeachment and a collision with the 2020 election: a fast-tracked impeachment of Trump.
The Democrats should move heaven and earth to get Robert Mueller to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee—soon. Given the contents of Mueller’s report, and his anger with how Barr has torpedoed it, it’s certainly possible that Mueller will testify that he didn’t indict Trump because of DOJ restrictions, that he wasn’t asking Barr to make the call he could make, that he instead prepared a report that he expected Congress to act upon, that Barr misrepresented his report in his four-page summary, and that Barr’s testimony about the conversations he and Mueller had about the report were untrue or misleading.
That’s as lethal an impeachment bludgeon as the Democrats are going to get this year. Instead of holding months of hearings and colliding with the 2020 elections, the House Judiciary Committee could draw up compelling, legitimate and detailed articles of impeachment based solidly on Mueller’s findings on Trump’s clear obstruction of justice in a couple of weeks. The Judiciary Committee could then hold a series of hearings over the next month to explain those articles to the media and the voters. Following those hearings, the Judiciary Committee could quickly vote to send impeachment to the floor for a vote. This would require another month of hearings, but the next step would be a vote by the full House, given the Democratic majority, to approve Trump’s impeachment and send it to the Senate for a decisive trial there. This results in a five- or six-month process by which impeachment would be handed over to Mitch McConnell’s Senate in late September or early October.
If you think Mitch McConnell will allow an impeachment trial to be held in the Senate, you don’t know Mitch McConnell or the Senate. He has the power to change Senate rules to ensure that a trial never even happens.
So the entire impeachment debate could be completed more than a year before the 2020 election, giving the Democrats the opportunity to:
· Truthfully state that they fulfilled their Constitutional responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his crimes
· Avoid a split between Pelosi and pro-impeachment Democrats
· Continue their other investigations of Trump, including those regarding his finances and tax returns
· Pursue their subpoena requests in the courts
· Force House Republicans to vote against their proposals on the issues most important to all Americans
· Most importantly of all, enable them to totally focus on campaigning against Trump and the GOP in every state in 2020 and defeat them at the polls.
Pelosi, Nadler, and the Democratic Party been struggling with impeachment for all the reasons I outlined in my first paragraph. But there is no doubt that they have the political skills and power to ram a Trump impeachment through the House well before the 2020 elections.
It’s the best impeachment hand the Democrats will ever hold between now and then.