One of us,
Woodson, already is on record in suggesting Congress will impeach Trump this
year. The other two of us, as much as
we’d like to see that, argue it won’t happen, if at all, until after the 2018
elections when Democrats could recapture the House of Representatives and
control of the impeachment process. We realize impeachment implicates legal and
political concerns and we ignore either at our peril. Now, we focus on
politics.
Some History Three American presidents -- Andrew Johnson,
Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton – have faced impeachment proceedings. No U.S. President has been removed from
office by conviction following impeachment, though Nixon resigned in anticipation
of certain impeachment and conviction.
“High Crimes
and Misdemeanors” represents the constitutional standard for impeaching a
president. Historically, a debate has
raged among the political class and legal scholars over whether the term means
an indictable criminal offense or merely political or practical misconduct. The record in the three cases shows a
combination of the two. In reality,
“High Crimes and Misdemeanors” means whatever Congress says it means.
The House
impeached Johnson in 1868 over his violation of a likely unconstitutional
statue -- the Tenure of Office Act.
Johnson tried to replace Secretary of War Edwin Stanton with General
Lorenzo Thomas. Congress passed that law
to protect Stanton and when Johnson wouldn’t follow it, the House approved 11
articles of impeachment. Three conviction votes in the Senate each fell one
vote short of the required two-thirds majority. The Johnson impeachment, therefore, was
blatantly political and Congressional Republicans, angry with Johnson over dealing
with the defeated Confederacy after the Civil War, didn’t worry about finding a
criminal charge against him.
The House
Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974,
two of them essentially political – abuse of power and contempt of Congress. But, the June 23, 1972, “smoking gun” tape in
which Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, plotted how to use the CIA
as a cover for stopping the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in,
would have resulted in a conviction on the third article, obstruction of
justice, had Nixon not resigned.
The impeachment
articles against Clinton that passed the House in 1998 involved criminal
charges -- perjury and obstruction of justice related to lying about his affair
with Monica Lewinsky. Because the
charges against Clinton concerned sex, the Senate was never going to convict.
It’s Politics So, the impeachment record shows it’s as much about politics
as about criminal wrongdoing. Impeaching
Trump would constitute a political act as much as a legal one, with wide
ranging consequences, making considering the politics of impeachment necessary. Republicans control both chambers, so
Congress wouldn’t likely impeach Trump until GOP members believe it in their
political interest to do so or think they can’t afford to resist. Assembling evidence against Trump and his
associates remains important, but we must at least partly view that evidence
through a political lens.
For Republicans to desert Trump, must Special
Prosecutor Robert Mueller develop an airtight criminal case against him? Nixon’s political support didn’t collapse
until his criminal culpability became clear. Since Trump’s sins, and those of
his colleagues, involve national security and foreign policy matters, what will
it take for enough of the public to support impeachment that Republicans get on
board or get out of the way? The public saw the Johnson and Clinton impeachments
as mostly political. Americans didn’t
think Congress should impeach Johnson over a personnel matter and they didn’t
want to run Clinton out of office over sex. Nixon’s overt criminality, however,
sufficed and he resigned in the face of the inevitable. What will the public require
for getting rid of Trump?
Afterwards Then there’s the fallout from impeachment. What happens if enough shoes drop this summer
that Congress does impeach Trump, making Mike Pence President by early 2018? We see two possible scenarios. Republicans could, of course, suffer a similar
fate as in the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. Democrats cleaned up in the 1974 mid-terms, picking
up 49 seats in the House and four in the Senate. Jimmy Carter arguably won the
White House in 1976 because of Watergate and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
But, for
those who oppose the Republican agenda, there’s also a nightmare scenario. Suppose Pence puts the GOP back on track by
doing things like picking a woman, say former South Carolina Governor and
current UN Ambassador Nikki Haley or Iowa Senator and hog farmer Joni Ernst, as
the new Vice President? Suppose Pence
cajoles his majorities into passing a big tax cut, makes Democrats a deal on
infrastructure spending they can’t refuse, and cobbles together a health care
deal that mollifies the firebrands in the House and blunts moderate Senate
opposition to repeal of the Affordable Care Act? Such a political resurrection might hold
Republican losses in the House in 2018 to the norm for the party holding the
White House and make Pence a formidable incumbent in 2020.
When
thinking about impeachment, a chilling phrase for this scenario comes to mind:
Be careful what you wish for.
