There’s been a lot more serious talk about impeachment lately, which makes sense, since there’s been a lot more evidence to support it, though some of that evidence, it seems to me, was a matter of public record before, but we’re revisiting the implications. For instance, I believe it was known before that Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes of this meetings with Putin. But, I’m not pounding my keyboard today (I’d like to say I’m taking up my pen, but I’m not) to make the legal case for impeachment. Individual-1 does that almost every time he opens his mouth.
The question is: should he be impeached or should he not be impeached, based on the pure politics of the thing. Michael Tomasky recently made the case for waiting until 2020 and booting him out, and his column has engendered a lot of internet commentary. He makes a decent case for this point of view, but I think he’s wrong. Maybe.
I think he should be impeached, but timing is all, as is a persuasive and well developed case for the prosecution. The point is not to get a conviction. It’s a given that not enough Republicans would jump ship to convict even if there are tapes of him promising Putin that he’d withdraw the U.S. from NATO in return for Putin’s help in the election, besides which many of them are probably “with the Russians too”. The point is to give the American people a comprehensive narrative of his criminality, which should be fresh in their minds as they go to the polls in 2020. I’m sure the people that the Times seeks out in diners will be unimpressed (why, one must ask again, were we never treated to stories about Obama voters?), but they’re not the people we’re aiming at.
The Democrats have to make it clear that they are invoking the constitutional remedy of impeachment because Individual-1 poses a clear and present danger to the continued existence of the American Republic. That means marshaling and presenting the evidence in a coherent fashion, both in committee hearings and in a Senate trial, which should be timed to occur at the optimum time. Just off the top of my head, the summer of 2020 sounds good, but I’m open to conviction on that one. In any event, it should come at a time when Republican senators voting for acquittal will do so with the knowledge that, while they are satisfying their base, they are probably offending everyone else, a category that contains the majority except in the very backward states. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs in 2020, and given the fact that Mitch McConnell may be as big a threat to democracy as the genius, and given the further fact that the American judiciary has already been ruined perhaps beyond redemption by a Republican Senate, winning the Senate is as important as winning the presidency.
If the Democrats make a compelling case for his guilt, and an equally compelling case for the proposition that the acts of which he’s guilty merit impeachment, and if the Republicans nonetheless vote to acquit, we may very well see the last of Republicans like Susan Collins. The Clinton impeachment failed in the court of public opinion, not because he wasn’t guilty of something, but because, while everyone knew he’d lied about having an affair, most people didn’t think that was a good enough reason to throw him out of office. Most people, on the other hand, did think that Nixon’s sins merited his removal, and the genius’s sins make Nixon look like a choir boy.
One obstacle, other than the Democrat’s inability to speak with a single voice, is the fact that the media has changed since Watergate days. There was no state media then, and the non-state media did not engage in the Republican enabling both-siderism with which it is infected today. Nonetheless, impeachment, if handled right, could be a net winner for the Democrats.
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