The brain dead
Democrats are arguing among themselves over whether to impeach the highly
impeachable president or wait until 2020 and try to beat him at the polls. It
does not seem to occur to them that they can do both.
The Senate Republican majority leader has turned
over to the president the keys to his home, car, heart and soul. If the House
were to impeach, Addison Mitchell McConnell is fully capable of – and probably
would – give the articles of impeachment the same disdainful dismissal he gave the
nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. The reconstituted Supreme
Court would uphold him, if it came to that.
None of which
would make the articles of impeachment disappear. There is something that
would, but I’ll come to that after the break. Before the break I would like to
recommend the most recent Lawfare commentary on the Mueller Report.
The
money graph:
To say that the appropriate course is simply to wait for the next presidential election in 18 months, is … to say that what matters is winning elections, even if it risks further institutional harms.There is a danger to this mode of thinking, which is that Democrats should tolerate the institutional harms that would come from not initiating a serious impeachment inquiry because what really matters is winning the 2020 election. When you convince yourself that the best way to safeguard the republic is for your side to win, it gets tempting to tolerate all kinds of intolerable things. It is the precise calculus many congressional Republicans have made in supporting Trump despite his degradations of his office.
I know a lot of people are sick and tired of the whole thing. A guy who is usually purple with indignation at the latest offense from the White House or Mar-a-Lago (BOTH of which the public pays for) told me today he hasn't read or watched the news since last Thursday. The poor soul we drive to church on Sundays told me Robert Mueller was a crook for listening to those liars. When I told him almost all of those liars had been hired and worked for Trump, he immediately switched to the two Marines Hillary Clinton killed. (Don't ask.)
But here's the thing: People who are not sick and tired are working actively against our interests. Condider that on the day the Mueller report was released -- all 488 typed pages, with tons of footnotes, of it -- the TV networks were going to be in need of some kind of illustration; they couldn't just show boring pages. Attorney General Robert Barr jumped in and gave TV the only sound bites it had (until Trump joined in later), guaranteeing that the coverage would revolve around Barr saying "No collusion, no obstruction."
That is not what Mueller said. But who would know unless he or she read the report?
President Trump has shown the kind of leadership he wants to provide by fawning over the dictators and musclemen who provide it in our new best-friend countries. Stay sick, and we can have that kind of government, too.
Yes! I go back and forth on the Impeachment issue. This morning I convinced myself that just having hearings to impeach (even though a conviction in the Senate is unlikely) will bring attention to the ways in which this administration is steadily undermining law enforcement, administrative practices, the civil service, sane foreign relations, and a decline in moral probity might wake up enough of our countrypersons to consider what is going on and will continue to go on until sanity and norms return to the WH. Maybe it would wake up enough of those upstanding Republican leaders to think about what they are colluding with and what they are obstructing!
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Nancy Pelosi with her left-wing gerbils has to maintain a big balancing act between actually getting any legislation out (think the budget next September), protecting the middle of the road Democrats just elected who will have to run again in 2020....and etc., etc....
Here's a sobering assessment of the Trumpian ME policies.... It will be hard, if not impossible to reverse them. At Politico. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/23/trump-obama-foreign-policy-226708
ReplyDeleteTopic para.
"Sure, there’s plenty of confusion, diplomatic malpractice and dysfunction in Trumpian foreign policy. But on two critical issues it is deadly functional: The administration is focused like a laser beam on irreversibly burning U.S. bridges to Iran and administering last rites to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And if you look at the administration’s actual policies, it’s clear they aren’t just meant to overturn President Barack Obama’s actions, but also to create points of no return—so that successor administrations cannot revert to past approaches even if they want to. If the administration succeeds—and it’s well on its way to doing so—it will have fundamentally damaged U.S. national interests for years to come."
I don't disagree with the case for impeachment (and I hear it emanating nightly from the person sitting next to me on the sofa). But in my heart of hearts, I think Pelosi is on the right course: Continue to investigate and keep Trump's sins on the front burner through appropriate committees, but turn the bulk of the effort into vigorously fighting his policies and addressing other important issues.
ReplyDeleteEven if Trump were dismissed through impeachment, would a Pence administration's policies be any better than those decried in Politico? No, they wouldn't.
I too have been going back and forth on the impeachment issue. For the reasons Tom and Margaret mention, I am leaning to the side that they need to proceed with the hearings to impeach, even though the Senate is very unlikely to convict. As Tom points out, that would not make the articles to impeach disappear. Then he says that that there is something that would, but I never did find out what that was. Did I miss it somewhere?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, bringing articles of impeachment would make a much needed statement. I think it is possible to do that, and work on beating Trump at the polls in 2020 at the same time. Realistically even if the impeachment were carried through, by the time Trump was removed from office the clock would be about to run out on his first term. I don't think the desire to deny him a second term is the same thing as wanting one's "side" to win at all costs.
There is something else that would weaken Trump's position for 2020, and that would be for other Republicans to primary him. I don't think they would be able to wrest the nomination from him, but the fact of going up against him would do some damage. I could see Kasich or maybe Romney doing it. They are both old enough that they probably aren't saving themselves for 2024.
DeleteWilliam Weld has announced and Kasich and Romney could be critical voices about Trump policies...not that I'd want any of them to win!
DeleteI'm sorry. When I wrote that something would make the articles of impeachment disappear I was thinking of the way the Barr press conference superseded the actual words of Mueller on the day the report was issued. If the Ds ever get to Articles of Impeachment, I have no doubt Trump will figure out some way to dominate the news on on the day of the vote -- arrest Hillary, bomb Iran, invade Mexico. Something else will dominate the news.
DeleteThey saw how well Wikileaks from the DNC swamped the Access Hollywood tapes story -- a coincidence I am not convinced was coincidental, nor is Mueller. The D's can't get traction even when their big news comes with sandpaper, rubber and tire chains.
Thanks for clarifying, Tom. You are right that Trump would do something to dominate the news and draw attention away from impeachment. Would be funny, though, if his "Look, a butterfly!" antics failed to have the desired effect. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.
DeleteSome supposed experts (I am think of you, Maureen Dowd) have said that Part II of the Mueller Report is the best. It covers the obvious but unprosecutable efforts to obstruct justice and shows what a zoo the White House actually is. But the Part I should not be overlooked. It says there was no (intentional) coordination while Trump was retweeting Russian fake news tweets and encouraging the Russians to butt in. But it also says that the Russian/Putin effort was wide and deep, and its goal was:
ReplyDelete1. Stop Hillary Clinton. Check.
2. Elect Donald Trump. Check.
3. Discredit the election. Partial check.
4. Divide Americans so they are fighting so much among themselves they can't get in Putin's way. Check and doublecheck.
The most successful election finagling in U.S. history got 3 1/2 out of 4 in what it aimed at. And Trump still hasn't seriously said it happened.
So now Trump is tweeting that he will ask the Supreme Court to intervene if impeachment proceedings are brought. It's unclear exactly how SCOTUS would be able to do anything about it. He's also going to thumb his nose at Congress about releasing his tax returns. Big surprise.
ReplyDeleteIf reflection was one of his virtues, it might occur to him that the thickness of the thread by which he is hanging is equal to the size of the Republican majority in the Senate, said majority being guaranteed only for the next 18 months or so, and the continuance of which may depend on his not indulging every whim, caprice and tantrum. Also, at some point he will have gone through the world's supply of flunkies and stooges who are loyal enough to protect him from himself by ignoring, slow-walking or disobeying his self-destructive edicts.
Delete"...the thickness of the thread by which he is hanging" may diminish if a number of Republicans come to believe they have more to lose than to gain by loyalty to Trump.
DeleteImpeachment is a prerogative a Congress outlined in the Constitution. In the impeachment process, the team of lawyers from the House act as the prosecutors and the president would have his own team of lawyers to defend him. The chief justice of the Supreme Court would preside over the proceedings.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess he would go to the Supreme Court, in a truncated form, as part of established impeachment proceedings. Though what the man actually meant by his tweeted references to the court is anyone's guess, and the MSM pundits are busy doing just that. The majority inference is that he thinks the court can step in to block impeachment, either as part of its constitutional power or because he thinks he can call in personal favors from his appointees.
DeleteRaber thinks we should all kick in and get a high school teacher to provide President Trump with some remedial civics instruction.