Donald Trump is no longer merely disgusting. He has become dangerous — to our country and to the world. With impeachment now no longer practicable, there remains only one way to remove him from power: he must be defeated for re-election. And the entire burden of removing him from power rests on the Democratic Party.
It is a strange and almost terrifying circumstance that so great a responsibility should come to rest on so loose and rag-tag an entity as a political party — even ours. To meet its responsibility, our party is going to have to improve upon its performance in almost any past presidential election year that you can recall. The candidates for the Democratic nomination must talk about what needs to be done, not about the shortcomings of their rivals. The democrats who vote in the primaries must give more than usual consideration to electability when they make their choices; not that they must vote against their ideals, but that they must not be distracted by lesser considerations. And if the nominee is less than inspiring — and there is no Barack Obama in the pack this time — we must work as hard as if our nominee were inspiring. We must be inspired, if not by our nominee, then by the importance of the work that we have to do.
If we choose a woman or a gay man to be our nominee, let it be because that person is, in our best judgement, the candidate among those who are qualified to be President who has the best chance of winning. Our goal is not to achieve another first, however valuable that might be in itself.
And let’s not assume that Trump will be easy to defeat for re-election. He is a gifted demagogue with money and the Fox News organization to back him up.
We can win — if we are dead serious about winning and if we don’t make too many mistakes. It’s up to us. Our country and the world are depending on us. Yikes.
SomervilleTom says
I reject the premise of your first paragraph. You casually assert that “impeachment [is] now no longer practicable”.
Horse feathers. The first step of impeachment is impeachment hearings. With a Democratic majority, those hearings can begin whenever Jerrold Nadler, its chair, decides to schedule them.
No responsible elected official will publicly support impeachment in the absence of evidence. That evidence is gathered from impeachment hearings. The Mueller report, which by law should be delivered in full to Mr. Nadler (and several other congressional committee chairs), can provide a roadmap and guidance for congressional investigators. That’s all. It was never the job of Mr. Mueller to directly develop evidence for impeachment.
The daily song-and-dance from our elected Democrats — both new and legacy — is tiresome. The action that needs to be taken is removal from office, and the next step for that is immediate impeachment hearings.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is some chance that Mr. Trump will WIN the 2020 election. The GOP will assert, in that scenario, that impeachment is off the table. We must NOT allow ourselves to be sucked into that trap.
A president who has committed impeachable offenses can and should be impeached for those offenses before or after a subsequent election. Mr. Nixon was elected by a historic landslide in 1972, and was removed from office in the face of inevitable impeachment and conviction two years later in 1974.
I am weary of this relentless cheerleading regarding 2020. If we Democrats are unwilling or unable to take the steps TODAY that are urgently needed and possible, then why on EARTH should I believe things will be any different in the future?
I will give no more contributions to ANY Democratic candidate for any national office until impeachment hearings begin.
jessefell says
I appreciate your point about the urgency of removing Trump from office. But what I fear most about beginning impeachment proceedings now is that, if Trump were to be acquitted by the Senate — as he surely would be given the current composition of that august body — he would be confirmed in his power to flout moral, ethical, and legal norms as he sees fit . You ought not attack a king unless you are sure you can kill him, as the adage goes. And an acquittal, coming right before the election would be taken by Trump as vindication.— and it would taken in the same sense by many members of that block of inattentive voters who decide the outcome of close elections.
All this would change if the Congress can obtain a pristine unredacted copy of the Mueller report, and the report contains clear evidence of wrongdoing serious enough to warrant impeachment in most voters’ eyes. This might then persuade enough Republican Senators to vote to convict to reach the magic number of 67.
If Trump is re-elected, then impeachment becomes a better bet, especially if the Democrats increase their numbers in the Senate. The Democrats will then have time to build a case for impeachment that will gain the public support needed to compel the needed number of Republican senators to vote to convict.
SomervilleTom says
I encourage you to slow down a bit.
There is a world of difference between starting impeachment hearings and moving ahead with a weak impeachment resolution. Richard Nixon would have served out his full second term if the Congress of 1974 had refused to even begin hearings out of fear that he might be acquitted in the Senate. I think the hearings should be conducted and the evidence gathered.
If the evidence supports an impeachment resolution, then it should be moved forward. If not, then it should not. It was clear that the evidence against Richard Nixon was overwhelming. By the time the Judiciary Committee finished its investigation, even the most stalwart of GOP supporters (and at the beginning there were many) agreed that he needed to be removed from office. Conversely, the case against Bill Clinton was extremely weak even in the House. We are at the “probable cause” stage, and the next step is to do the investigation.
In your second paragraph, I encourage you to separate public disclosure from disclosure to the various committee chairs. The several committee chairs MUST be given an opportunity to review the full and unredacted report. There is ample precedent for various ways to handle the several security concerns that may arise. For example, for genuinely sensitive national security information, a secure viewing area can be arranged so that the committee chairs may read it without fear of copies or leaks (all of them already have the necessary security clearances).
Again, the evidence in the Mueller report is unlikely to be the evidence needed for impeachment, because the Mueller investigation was conducted with different priorities. The value of the Mueller report to the Judiciary Committee is to provide a roadmap for a Judiciary Committee investigation and hearings.
I see little value in making the Mueller report public. It is congress — the House and perhaps eventually the Senate — that needs access to that information.
The point is that the burden of this falls on Congress, not Mr. Mueller and not the DoJ.
Mr. Trump either has or has not committed impeachable offenses. That is an objective reality that has nothing to do with who wins the election or when those offenses are uncovered. The time for Democrats to start gathering that evidence is RIGHT NOW (it actually was when Ms. Pelosi first took the gavel). In the event that Mr. Trump has committed impeachable offenses, then each and every extra day of investigation makes it that much more likely that evidence of that is uncovered by the committee.
If we use the history with Richard Nixon (and for that matter, Bill Clinton) as a guide, then public support is much less important than what evidence is actually gathered.
The bottom line is that the ball is squarely in the Democratic Party’s court. It is our duty to begin impeachment hearings, right now.
jessefell says
Yes, let impeachment hearings go ahead now. They must, for all the reasons that you cite.
My fear remains that evidence of genuinely damning impeachable offenses will be uncovered (I think they already have, in fact), without Trump paying the penalty required — removal from office by the United States Senate.
And Trump almost certainly would escape having to pay the penalty as long as the composition of the U. S. Senate remains what it is. Not only are the Democrats far short of having the required 67 votes. There is also the fact that the Republican Party of 2019 is far different from the Republican Party of 1974. Then, the Republican Party had not yet become the hyper-partisan movement that it is today. There were Republicans who could put country above party; that is why Nixon was forced to resign. But today, there are maybe one or two Republicans in the Senate who might be persuaded to vote for conviction.
That is what I don’t think that impeachment is practicable now. We would simply blunt our noses against the brick wall of Republican hyper-partisanship, confirming Trump in his authority to flout legal and ethical norms, and giving him grounds (merely specious to be sure) to claim that he had been exonerated.
And I believe that the unredacted Mueller report must be made public. Impeachment proceeding, whenever they occur, need to create broad based public support for removing Trump from office. That support won’t materialize as long as the grounds for removal are withheld from the public.