Of Course the House Needs to Impeach Trump

Since the redacted Mueller report was released Thursday, there has been a lot of discussion about whether House Democrats should move forward with impeaching Trump.

While the arguments for doing so should be obvious (even if one ignores the Mueller report), I have also heard a number of arguments (from Trump opponents, ostensibly) saying that impeachment should be off the table.  Arguments such as:

• The Senate will never vote to remove Trump from office.
• The election is 'only' 18 months away.
• Impeaching Trump will backfire on Democrats the way impeaching Clinton backfired on Republicans in 1998.
• I don't mind living in a country with a racist, criminal, ignorant president who permanently separates children from their families and puts them in jail, really I don't.
• Other equally ridiculous things.

It's a slam dunk that Trump is unfit for office.  Anyone who doesn't already accept that can see various cases for that argument here and here.  If you don't want to take my word for it, there are many other people making this same point.  And contrary to laughable and clearly dishonest White House claims that the Mueller report found 'no collusion - no obstruction', it seems fairly clear that Mueller intended his report to be an impeachment referral to Congress.  No one outside the cult of Trump really believes he has any business remaining in office.

So it is incumbent upon Congress --- and, specifically, Democrats in Congress, since Republicans have spent the last two years demonstrating that they value their loyalty to Trump above the Constitution and rule of law --- to act to remove him.  Inherent in that charge is that they act in a way most likely to result in Trump's removal.

This means that while congressional Democrats shouldn't just wait around for the 2020 election, neither should they hold an impeachment vote tomorrow.  Instead, they need to build their case and present it to the American public, to put maximum pressure on the Senate to do their job.  Given the overwhelming criminality of this president, I believe that a well-constructed case might actually persuade 20 Republican Senators (or more!) to remove Trump from office.  And even if it doesn't, House Democrats have a responsibility to the country to try.

I'll lay out the two principal arguments in favor of action, followed by addressing the arguments some have made against it.

Trump is Destroying the Country

One takeaway from the Muller report is that, as David Graham of The Atlantic writes: "Trump’s own handpicked aides and close associates, viewing his orders as illegal, counterproductive, dishonest, or just plain stupid, simply don’t carry them out."  This has been a theme throughout his presidency, and will continue as long as he's allowed to remain in the White House.  What's worse, given his recent purges at DHS and the installation of willing lackey Bill Barr as Attorney General, we should expect that Trump is trying to find people who WILL carry out his "illegal, counterproductive, dishonest, or just plain stupid" orders.  He may well succeed.  And some of those orders will result in needless suffering of children.

Congress can't just watch that happen for 18 months.  If Trump had committed only one or two transgressions --- like lying about an extramarital affair, say --- then perhaps it would make sense to let the voters decide on election day.  But when your house is on fire, you don't wait for the rain to come; you call the fire department.

If You Can't Impeach Trump, You Can't Impeach Anyone

Last month, Nancy Pelosi seemed to suggest that she won't proceed with impeachment without Republican support: "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path . . .".  There's reason to believe that she's playing a long game here, but on it's face, this statement is just plain wrong.

Someday, there will be another Republican president.  And if that man is sworn in knowing that Donald Trump wasn't impeached despite his long list of transgressions, then he'll feel emboldened to break whatever laws he wishes, so long as there are more than 33 Republicans in the Senate.

Don't Assume the Senate Won't Remove Trump

Some have argued that the worst case scenario is actually impeaching Trump followed by the Senate letting him off the hook.  That would certainly be bad, but no worse than giving Trump a pass in the first place.  Both scenarios end with Trump facing no consequences for his actions.  But an important difference is that in the second scenario, Senate Republicans are the villains for explicitly approving his behavior, while in the first, House Democrats are the villains for failing to hold him accountable in the first place.

Personally, I like politicians who do the right thing, and I think the country as a whole does, too.  If I'm wrong about that, then I guess none of this matters, but I'm not ready to just assume that American democracy has utterly failed.  I want to see it for myself.

Moreover, while it's probably true that we won't find 20 Republicans ready to convict Trump tomorrow (we probably won't even find one), that doesn't mean that Republicans can't be persuaded to do the right thing in the face of a well-built case for impeachment with solid public support.  Richard Nixon's public support was sky-high before the House commenced impeachment hearings, but it fell nearly 40 points as the facts came out.  And Trump's approval has never been much above 40%.  If impeachment hearings drop his approval even a few points into the mid 30s, do we really think Senate Republicans will cast a vote to keep him in office?

I say let's find out.

Won't Impeaching Trump Backfire on Democrats?

When a man as dangerously unfit as Trump is in the White House, there is a moral and constitutional duty to remove him, political consequences be damned.  But it seems likely the political fallout of impeachment --- even if the Senate allows Trump to remain in office --- is far more likely to help Democrats than to hurt them.

Trump's impeachment will fire up his base.  But it will fire up Trump's opponents as well, especially if the Senate lets him remain in office.  And since there have always been more people opposing Trump than supporting him (recall that he lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes), that's a tradeoff we should be happy to make.

Conversely, a lot of Democrats --- including me --- invested a lot of time and energy into electing a Democratic House in 2018.  If House Democrats refrain from impeaching Trump, it's unlikely we'll see that same level of enthusiasm to turn out the Democratic base in 2020.  Meanwhile, Trump's supporters will still be fired up because they always are, and because their hero 'got away with it'.

And finally, even if impeachment doesn't ultimately result in Trump's removal, it insures that Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors feature prominently in all election coverage, which has to be a net positive for the Democrats.

But Clinton's Impeachment Backfired on Republicans
It's conventional wisdom that the impeachment proceedings the Republican Congress brought against Bill Clinton in 1998-99 hurt them politically, but I'm not so sure that's true.  So far as I can tell, this is the full list of ways in which the Republican party was damaged:

• Republicans saw their majority in the House drop from 227-206 to 223-211.
• Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich lost his job --- and then when his replacement, Bob Livingston, was named, he was immediately forced to resign as well.
• The 1998 election was otherwise a draw --- neither party gained in the Senate or gubernatorial races --- but the Republicans did lose control of the Senate in 2000.

This should be considered the absolute worst-case scenario for Democrats in 2020, and if a few House seats is the cost of impeaching Trump, then it's well worth the risk.

But I think it's extremely unlikely a Trump impeachment causes even this much blowback for Democrats.  The Clinton impeachment was widely recognized as a partisan witch hunt about a single extramarital affair.  On the eve of Clinton's impeachment, only 35% approved of Starr's handling of his investigation, while 58% of the public currently trust Robert Mueller.  And as everyone knows, Trump's crimes are far more serious and far more pervasive than Clinton's (every day Jared Kushner continues to have a security clearance puts our country at risk).

Meanwhile, consider the context of the 'damage' done to Republicans in 1998:

• Although the 5-seat loss in the House for the GOP was historic in a sense, it's important to remember that Republicans had picked up a whopping 54 seats in the 1994 election.  Their loss in 1998 was likely part of a correction among voters.
• Gingrich owes the loss of his job in part (and Livingston owes it completely) to their hypocrisy in impeaching a Democratic president over an extramarital affair when each of them were also having affairs.  The Democrats who impeach Trump won't be subject to similar hypocrisy.
• Whatever damage the Republican party sustained was short-lived.  They won the presidency in 2000 and held the White House, House and Senate from 2002-2006.

Democrats should hope to suffer such 'damage'.  Indeed, House impeachment manager Lindsey Graham, who lead the effort to impeach Clinton, is likely to win his fourth Senate term in 2020, despite the hypocrisy of being one of Trump's biggest supporters after saying this in 1998:

(Lightly edited from the original version, to correct an earlier math error, and to make it more readable and less crappy).