I now know why so many Democratic members of Congress are loyal to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even if some did cry foul last week when she declared that – at least for now – impeachment of Donald Trump is off the table.
She has good instincts. Impeachment of any president is almost always a terrible idea. Even when the president is Donald Trump, who is perhaps the most eminently impeachable president in recent American history in terms of both character and behavior.
Yes, Donald Trump is – in my opinion and that of millions of other Americans – a reprehensible human being who is basically unfit to hold the office. He is ignorant of the history of the White House and the country and government he ostensibly leads, and he has no desire to learn even as he does his best to destroy institutions that have taken generations to build. He is reckless almost beyond belief, and his impulsiveness combined with his compulsive need to lash out at others and to destroy the accomplishments of his predecessors is laying waste to 70 years of international diplomacy and alliance building.
He seems to have the instincts of an autocrat, accustomed to being the sole decider, and is clearly uncomfortable with messy democracy.
And, perhaps worst of all, he seems to view the presidency of the United States as a vehicle for feathering his own nest, a fundraising bonanza for him and his family.
But that doesn’t mean impeachment now is the right remedy for his misfeasance and malfeasance. Or maybe ever.
Impeachment is ultimately a political option, designed by our political forefathers to solve a political problem. Impeachment is the true nuclear option for getting rid of a president between elections, and the two times it was chosen – for Andrew Johnson in the 19th century and for Bill Clinton in the 20th – it didn’t work.
In fact, Clinton’s popularity rose in the course in his impeachment trial in the Senate and its aftermath, to a 73 percent approval rating, its greatest height in his entire two-term presidency.
The crazy thing is that the one time an impeachment movement actually worked was in the case of Richard Nixon, who wasn’t impeached at all.
As history quickly recedes in our national rearview mirror, the case of Nixon is worth a quick review. Our 37th president was ultimately undone by a minor burglary in the latter days of his 1972 re-election campaign, when Republican operatives looking for dirt on the campaign of Nixon’s opponent broke into the national Democratic Party headquarters.
It was only in 1973, after Nixon had won a second term, that Congress investigated and discovered the depth of the Nixon campaign’s involvement. Even then, Nixon himself successfully avoided personal blame – until Congress, in 1974, successfully subpoenaed (with the aid of the Supreme Court) tapes the president had made of meetings in the Oval Office.
Those tapes provided irrefutable evidence – in his own voice – that the president and his closest advisers were personally involved in the whole sordid affair.
What public support he still had left quickly evaporated. The House of Representatives began to prepare impeachment proceedings. And the beleaguered Nixon, knowing that he would be both impeached and convicted in the Senate, resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.
That was more than two years after what a White House spokesman had dismissed as “a third-rate burglary” had happened and more than a year and a half after the truth behind the burglary began to be known. And it happened after many months of evidence-gathering and of testimony before Congress from a whole army of witnesses.
In the case of our current president, investigations – which must be painstaking and time-consuming, assembling reams of facts – have just begun. Congressional investigators certainly have plenty of material to work with.
The evidence they uncover has to be detailed and persuasive – enough to begin to persuade a majority of Americans that in fact Trump is actually unfit to continue in office. Impeachment – as we have seen – must be bipartisan. I don’t know about Andrew Johnson’s, but Bill Clinton’s was nakedly partisan – and it failed.
In the case of our current president, Pelosi said – importantly – that she would act if faced with “something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.”
And the electoral clock is running. We are just 19 months from November 2020, when the country’s voters will judge whether Donald Trump deserves a second term. If he even runs again, which I don’t think is a sure thing.
In the meantime, the evidence against the president – which I and many others think is abundant – can be slowly unearthed by the Congress and shared openly with the American people, who will make their own judgments.
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And when you impeach a president you must have strong evidence and you must have the people behind you.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)