To impeach or not to impeach. That's not the question.
The dilemma for Democrats is whether to broach the topic at all. California billionaire Tom Steyer, he of the non-stop “Need to Impeach” ads on cable TV news, clearly thinks they should.
My advice? I say, “Remember Newt Gingrich.” But that can wait.
Steyer, who was in Atlanta on Monday, has spent enough money on his project — $20 million or so – to have earned a few paragraphs. Close to 150 or so interested people attended his town hall-style gathering, one of 30 or so across the country. None of the attendees were fans of President Donald Trump, but they weren’t brandishing pitchforks, either.
They required convincing, and the messages coming from Steyer and his team were mixed. The warm-up guy described the movement as “an aspirational thing.”
“The Congress that’s seated in January of 2019 will be the folks who decide whether Donald Trump will be impeached or not. We all know the current Congress would never impeach this president,” he said.
Steyer, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager, expressed more urgency. “World War III is no joke,” he said. And indeed, the prospect of Trump’s itchy Twitter finger on the big, big red button is worrisome. Steyer spoke of the panels of constitutional scholars he had consulted, of the teams of psychiatrists brought in to assess Trump’s mental state.
“We don’t view this as a partisan issue. We view this as a question of patriotism, about protection of our democracy, about protection of our country,” he said. “We know for sure that if this president is impeached and removed from office, that he will be replaced by a Republican – most likely a conservative Republican from Indiana. We know that.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm in the U.S. House, is once again targeting two Republican-held congressional districts in north metro Atlanta as prime pick-up opportunities in November: Karen Handel’s Sixth and Rob Woodall’s Seventh.
U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the head of the DCCC, said recently that he’s advising candidates to stick to close-to-the-ground issues. “These districts, when they get nationalized, we see the challenges that exist,” he told my Journal-Constitution colleague Tamar Hallerman. “They have to be kept local.”
For the most part, Democrats followed Luján’s advice on Monday. Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, who may be eyeing a statewide play in 2020, was the only Democratic elected official in sight – and she was on the panel with Steyer and Bakari Sellers, a CNN political analyst and former state representative from South Carolina.
Sellers, an African-American, was the skeptic. “Sixty percent thought Donald Trump didn’t have the temperament to be president,” he noted. “Over 60 percent thought that he didn’t have the morals or ethics to be president. And yet many of those voted for him to be president of the United States anyway.”
Tomlinson served as lawyer for pro-impeachment forces. “The Founding Fathers didn’t want there to be constant insurrection,” she said. “They actually allowed for a way to handle tyranny and authoritarianism and other abuses of power, through the impeachment mechanism.”
She pointed the audience to the last paragraph in Federalist Paper No. 66, written by Alexander Hamilton. It amounts to a verbose treatise on what might happen when an impeached president is to be judged by his partisan allies in the Senate. “We may … count upon their pride, if not upon their virtue,” Hamilton wrote. The line probably generated some snickers 230 years ago, too.
But it does bring us to the math of the situation. In an impeachment proceeding, the U.S. House acts as grand jury. A majority vote is all that’s required for what would amount to an indictment.
The U.S. Senate behaves as a jury. Sixty-seven senators, a two-thirds majority, are required to convict. One does not embark on Step A unless one is confident that Step B is achievable. To throw the spear and miss the king is bad policy. Remember that it was the threat of impeachment that forced Richard Nixon from the White House — ouster by vote of the U.S. Senate has never been accomplished.
Perhaps this is why James Comey, the fired FBI director, declared Trump to be “morally unfit” to be president, but thinks impeachment is a bad idea. He prefers subjecting Trump to the denial of a second term.
“People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values,” he said. “And so impeachment, in a way, would short circuit that.”
Then there is the immediate precedent of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, one of the great political blunders of the 20th century. It had a lasting impact on the fortunes of that aforementioned Georgia congressman, Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich had seized the House speakership four years earlier, a stunning mid-term Republican victory. The mid-terms of ’98 were forecast to produce between six and 30 more seats for the GOP. With Gingrich’s encouragement, Republicans doubled down on Monica Lewinsky and impeachment in the fall campaign.
The debate enraged Democratic voters, driving them to the polls.
House Republicans lost five seats, and Gingrich was forced out of the speakership. A lame-duck Congress proceeded with two articles of impeachment, but Republicans in the Senate never mustered more than 50 votes, none from Democrats.
One is tempted to say that the impeachment of Clinton continued to hurt Republicans in the 2000 presidential contest, because Democrat Al Gore narrowly edged out the Republican, George W. Bush, in the popular vote.
But that’s another story.
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