Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump during the the United Nations Climate Action Summit during the General Assembly, September 23, 2019
By the end of this year, Donald Trump will become the third U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives and not convicted by the Senate. Depending on your perspective, you may see that as a constitutional design flaw or something that ultimately puts the electorate in charge of determining the political leadership. Impeachment was always a last-resort remedy reserved for the gravest abuses of power. It worked in 1974 when the parties were not as ideologically sorted, but has been rendered ineffective today.
So why impeach? Well, that one is simple: The question has shifted from Donald Trump’s conduct to the credibility and viability of Congress itself. The most recent impeachment trigger, Trump’s bullying of a smaller country desperate for foreign aid to get them to assist in a political hit job on a chief rival, is certainly worthy of the threshold of high crimes or misdemeanors. But it’s no greater abuse than a host of other activities, from obstruction of justice to using the Justice Department’s antitrust laws to attack corporate foes.
The tipping point did not happen on a phone call to the president of Ukraine in July, but in a series of town hall meetings with frontline Democratic House members (the ones most vulnerable for re-election) in August. Members like Abigail Spanberger came into the month thinking they had threaded the needle and heeded the wishes of their moderate constituents. The frontliners’ theory was that the threat to their futures lay with the Squad, and radicalism to their left. It turns out the people were with the radicals on what mattered most—holding lawlessness accountable. The biggest threat to the moderates, in other words, was inaction.
Here’s the best way of putting it: Trump is Wells Fargo.
The big bank was among those who contributed to the near implosion of the entire U.S. economy in 2008, and despite that, none of its top executives were held accountable. And Wells Fargo, consciously or unconsciously, got the message that they could continue their practices with relative impunity. And they did. They signed up customers to fake accounts, falsified records in mortgage cases, charged people for junk auto insurance they didn’t ask for, and even charged overdraft fees on accounts that were closed.
Why did this unending series of scandals cease to end? Why did the overt PR promises from Wells Fargo add up to nothing, as the corporate culture still trended toward ripping off customers? Well, what would be the point of Wells Fargo changing its policies? Nobody went to jail, no executive had their assets seized and ended up destitute, and no penalty served as anything more than giving away a small cut of ill-gotten profits. Amid this lack of deterrence, the crime spree continued, and continues.
Trump is Wells Fargo. He sought out dirt from foreign allies in the 2016 election. Nothing happened. He fired the FBI director before he could investigate the matter. Nothing happened. He used the presidency as a profit center for his hotels and resorts. Nothing happened. Protected by the backstop of Senate Republicans and the fecklessness of House Democrats, he knew that he could get away with whatever it took to stay in and profit from power. So he called up the Ukrainian president, because why not.
When you tell someone they won't be punished for their misconduct, they tend to keep doing it.
Suddenly, House moderates’ biggest problem was Nancy Pelosi’s willingness to ignore observable reality. Democrats have become disillusioned by the House strategy in 2019, passing meaningless and pre-compromised bills that fall into a Mitch McConnell–created black hole, while slow-walking anything resembling accountability for the administration. Even holding up transfers of funds to cage children became a bridge too far.
Pelosi walked the entire frontline membership into a blind corner. The problem was no longer “will Democrats move too far to the left” but “will Democrats really do nothing in the face of Trump.” Pelosi completely misread this, and it threatened her majority.
So that’s why you saw seven of the most vociferous opponents to impeachment come out last night in The Washington Post supporting an impeachment inquiry. And that’s why Pelosi now supports impeachment, and why the inquiry has begun with a select committee.
It’s kind of incredible that it took nine months and yet another abuse of power for Pelosi’s team to consider that inertia might be making her party look weak and out of touch. But then, this is the same set of politicians who didn’t raise much of a bother when banking executives got off scot-free after the financial crisis. They had a comfort with impunity that the public does not share. The past two decades have seen one instance of elite impunity after another, one failure of accountability after another, and voters have responded by voting the party in power out of office virtually every year. Impunity leads to social unrest. This had to end.
Of course, impeachment will die in the Senate, as it did for Andrew Johnson (by just one vote) and Bill Clinton. There’s no guarantee that McConnell will even allow an impeachment case to be tried in his chamber. Avoiding a trial would require a Senate rule change, and that would become a proxy vote for impeachment. But it’s one Republicans would seemingly have no problem with passing, avoiding a spectacle of a trial, with House impeachment managers making their case on national television for hours. They could even let Susan Collins and Cory Gardner walk on the vote and still get what’s necessary to change the rule.
Donald Trump has been practically begging to be impeached, thinking it will aid his re-election to position himself as the outsider Washington Democrats hate. I don’t think that positioning necessarily gets him the numbers he needs in key states. But impeachment is about more than Donald Trump, and even the 2020 election.
If Congress refused to act now, it would have been better off dissolving itself. A co-equal branch of government would have proved itself unequal, and indeed an accomplice to crimes. The principles of law have been at stake for the past two decades, and people in power have chipped away at them at every turn. It took someone like Trump for some restoration to occur. But it was so necessary for so long, and maybe it will spur a newfound embrace of justice to save it from the trampling it has experienced recently.
