Why
Impeachment Matters, Regardless of the Outcome
December 10, 2019
Chris Winters
Yes! Magazine
As I’m writing this, the House Judiciary
Committee has unveiled two articles of impeachment against President
Trump which, according to my awesome powers of precognition, are going to get
approved by the U.S. House of Representatives only to get voted down later in
the Senate.
Snark aside: The only area of ambiguity
so far has been how many articles of impeachment the Democrats would draw up,
even though the House leadership was notoriously skittish about doing
so until Trump’s egregious extortion of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky
was exposed in September. Most analysts believe the Republicans will
vote to protect their leader, facts be damned.
So why are we doing this? While it’s
highly unlikely Trump will be removed from power before the 2020 election,
there are a couple arguments to be made that impeaching him serves a higher
purpose, even if the outcome is most likely a foregone conclusion.
One is a moral argument. The language in
the Constitution lays out Congress’ sole authority to impeach and remove
the president and other officers of the federal government. The framers’
intent to hold the president accountable stemmed not just from idealism, but
from a very real fear that the head of state could be subservient to corruption
by a foreign power, hence the “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and
misdemeanors” language in Article 2, Section 4. The English Civil War and
Stuart Restoration provided the founders a then-recent example of heads of
state (King Charles I and II) working with the enemy (France) to subvert Parliament.
The framers sought to avoid a repeat of
that experience. And yet, Donald Trump appears to be exactly the sort of
president they had in mind when they wrote the impeachment
clause: corrupt, criminal and willing to sacrifice national security for
his personal and political interests. By definition, he should be impeached,
and if he isn’t, then we might as well give up and admit that the president is
above the law. Because if not him, then whom?
But with today’s polarized environment,
there’s a risk that the impeachment process will be seen as not just partisan
politics, but nothing more than political theater. What is to stop a future
Republican-controlled House from automatically working to impeach a Democratic
president, out of pure spite? (One could argue the impeachment of Bill Clinton
was one such example of an investigation in search of a crime, but Clinton was,
in fact, impeached on a charge of lying to a federal investigator, something
which Trump is almost certain to have done to Special Counsel Robert
Mueller.)
That could happen, but the more important
question is directed at the rest of us who watch from the sidelines: What
can we do about this if impeachment won’t stop Trump, since the
chance impeachment will deter Trump from doubling down on his lawlessness is
effectively zero? Should we do anything, or just go into the election
voting for who we planned to, as if none of this mattered? Most polls show now
that most people made up their mind about Trump and the impeachment
process a while ago—support (or lack thereof) has been remarkably consistent
since the beginning, with the only shift occurring when the Ukraine scandal
broke in September.
Certainly, the Republicans’ arguments in
defense of the president have amounted to little more than denying facts that
have been thoroughly documented and testified to, for regurgitation on Fox News
and the right-wing blogosphere. Short of a John Dean-style explosive
revelation on television, the needle is unlikely to move very far in one
direction or the other, regardless of what happens in the impeachment
proceedings.
But there’s another argument as to why
impeachment is necessary: Rather than let the impeachment process fade and
become background noise to the 2020 election, it makes
good political sense to keep on beating that drum. Here’s why.
The 2020 presidential election is
probably going to be the most significant presidential election the country has
had since Abraham Lincoln won in 1860. If Trump wins re-election, it could be
the last election we have that isn’t an outright sham (if this election doesn’t
turn out that way anyhow).
But electing a president is not the only
deal on the table. Stopping Trump is the top priority, but ensuring that the
Trumpists in government lose wherever they hold power is just as important if
we ever want to undo the damage already done to the country. That means
protecting the House, taking the Senate, reversing Republican court-packing,
and carrying the fight forward into the redistricting battles of early 2021 and
the statehouse elections later that year. If progressives want to win not just
a battle, but the entire war, they’ll have to both defeat
Republicans and pressure moderate Democrats to do the right thing,
while laying the groundwork for the next generation of progressive leaders.
If Democrats, and especially the
progressives in the party, can’t do that, then even winning the presidency may
be a short-term victory. And right now, the Republicans have a deep
institutional advantage.
The reason we’ve come to this point is
that a movement based on White supremacy, robber-baron capitalism, and
intolerant religiosity has gained control over one of the two political
parties, and the other party is just now (mostly) waking up to this fact.
It doesn’t really matter when this
started: whether it’s the natural extension of the Tea Party, or stems
from Newt Gingrich’s drive to delegitimize any Democratic rule, or even
from the earlier paranoid conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society (which
is still around, by the way) or other fringe groups.
What matters is that the far-right has
decades of experience mobilizing in communities, getting people elected to
school boards and town councils, where they try to ban books or police
bedrooms, which creates a deep back-bench of talent to later rise up to state
legislatures and ultimately to Congress and the federal government.
There also is an ecosystem of right-wing
think tanks, foremost among them the Federalist Society, whose sole purpose is
to develop a well of legal talent and provide their young recruits with career
guidance and a nationwide network bound by ideology. Current Supreme Court
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil
Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John
Roberts are members of or enjoyed the support of the Society. And there
are many wealthy patrons, notable among them Charles Koch and his late
brother David Koch, who have funded those think tanks and insurgent candidates,
especially since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling
removed many restrictions on dark money in campaigns.
The right laid down the foundations of
this movement years ago, and is now reaping the rewards. The Trump
Administration has been rightly criticized for being little more than a
wealth-protection and enhancement scheme for the president, his family and
fellow billionaires, but the political victories they’ve achieved have
included destroying the apparatus of a regulatory state, and ramming
through a record number of under- and un-qualified judges to lifetime
appointments in the federal courts, where they will influence society and
the law for decades to come, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
The 2018 midterm elections were
proof that local organization matters, as Democrats replaced party stalwarts
with young progressives and flipped formerly Republican districts into
Democratic ones. A few off-year elections in which a few key governor’s
races and statehouses also turned blue pointed to the momentum
Democrats have going into 2020.
They’ll need to maintain that energy.
There needs to be a much deeper bench of progressive talent to draw from if
today’s wins are to be sustainable. The most reactionary elements of the right
have been working on this since the 1980s. If progressives don’t take charge on
building that movement now, all their recent wins will prove to be temporary.
More than anything else, the historically
unpopular Trump Administration has proved to be a rallying point for the left.
The impeachment process should add more fuel to that fire, and when Trump is
acquitted, we’ll have to work even harder to keep the flame burning. We can’t
let ourselves become disappointed and jaded when we lose that the battle. We
need to ensure that this will be the costliest pyrrhic victory Trump has won to
date.
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Chris Winters is a senior editor at
YES! He covers economics and politics.
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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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