Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional effort to impeach, has left George Bush among the most unpopular of all presidents with a large minority, possibly a plurality, of Americans believing he deserves impeachment.
Clinton was impeached for personal reasons, on both sides of the equation: it was his personal behavior that provided whatever basis for the charges existed, and the desire to impeach him was intensely personal as well. However much impeachment proponents dislike Bush and Cheney—often considerably—the rationale for impeaching them is their official behavior. Consequently, any indictment of the two, whether for repeatedly breaking the law with respect to warrantless surveillance, or violating the Geneva conventions, or politicizing the Department of Justice or any of a number of other crimes, would constitute an indictment of their Congressional enablers as well.
No doubt that's among the reasons some Democrats in Congress are dead set against the idea, since many of them can be counted among the enablers. But in the long run, Democrats are missing an opportunity to methodically expose the scofflaw nature of the Republican party and to decertify it as a legitimate participant in governing the country until it reconstitutes itself in a more palatable form (or until Democrats implode, whichever happens first).
Nancy Pelosi recently restated her opposition to impeachment, saying that it would be divisive. As I noted at the time, she's absolutely right. On one side of the divide would be those who support the Constitution and the rule of law, and on the other, whether from party loyalty or personal philosophy, those who don't. It's a division that, were it to be explicitly drawn, would benefit the country and those Democrats who stand on the better side of it even if impeachment were to fail, which is possible, or if impeachment succeeded and the Senate voted, as is all but certain, to acquit.
Should the next president be a Democrat, he or she would benefit considerably from serving with a Congress in which Republicans were stigmatized by having been forced to side with Bush and Cheney against the Constitution and Democrats were clearly identified as standing with it. A Republican president would be constrained by the same circumstances.
The refusal to impeach leaves a lack of clarity about the legitimacy of the things Bush and Cheney have done. It creates a situation in which some of their excesses may be rolled back by the next president and Congress without explicitly identifying what was wrong with their actions or holding anyone accountable. It provides Republicans the opportunity to disavow Bush and Cheney once they're out of office without being formally associated with the lawlessness and irresponsibility that have been the administration's hallmarks, an opportunity that Republicans will surely seize.
Bush still has a year left in which to deepen the unholy mess he's leaving to his successor. It's a mess that will present a Democratic president, should we get one, with serious difficulties in meeting the expectations of the public generally and Democrats in particular. Impeachment would serve the purpose of fixing responsibility for that mess where it belongs, on the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans, provide the president and the Democratic party with some insulation against the inevitable disappointment, and make capitalizing on that disappointment more difficult for Republicans.
Consider: a Democratic president will take office during an economic slump, probably a recession, bearing a laundry list of expensive commitments to social programs and infrastructure improvements of which Americans overwhelmingly approve.
In the critical first year of that presidency, the interest on the national debt will consume $450 billion of whatever money is available—a sum that will continue to grow until the budget goes into surplus, which won't happen any time soon—and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will eat up another $200 billion or so even if, and it's a big if, the US begins immediately to withdraw from Iraq.
Other defense spending will top $500 billion, and both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are committed to the expensive proposition of repairing the damage done the military during the Bush years and to increasing its size and, necessarily, its budget. Both will spend at least a portion of the presumptive savings from Iraq on escalating the US presence in Afghanistan; both have said they will use another portion of those savings to address the humanitarian nightmare the US has created in Iraq. So even if we do leave Iraq, much of the anticipated peace dividend is already committed elsewhere.
Both have also committed to maintaining whatever forces are necessary to protect US diplomatic and civilian personnel remain in Iraq, and to conduct "anti-terrorist" missions. The unpleasant paradox is that as US combat forces leave, the remaining troops and civilian personnel will be at greater risk and in need of more protection, which makes leaving, in the generally understood sense of the word, more difficult.
Presidents can do many things without spending much money—executive orders aren't all bad, and personnel decisions are important—and one hopes that a Democratic president will use the opportunities wisely. Much of what Democrats are offering, though, is expensive. Addressing health care, even in the somewhat haphazard and minimalist fashions advocated by Obama and Clinton, will cost a lot of money: Obama underestimates the cost of his plan at $50-60 billion annually (what's $10 billion among friends?), while Clinton underestimates hers at $110 billion annually, or roughly the amount that would be saved if we got out of Iraq entirely and left Ryan Crocker to his own devices, which isn't going to happen even if everything goes exactly as planned. Both promise more money for research, education, infrastructure and so on. The money isn't there.
Impeachment wouldn't add money to the treasury, but it would give a Democratic president and Congress more breathing room to make the case either for why they're not able to do as much as they promised, or why they're having to run up the debt yet further in order to deliver.
Most importantly, though, impeachment would prevent the behavior of the Bush administration from being swept under the rug next year and resurrected later by presidents of either party. It would unequivocally condemn executive branch lawlessness and corruption, and it would set a standard for behavior that future administrations would be forced to respect. Without impeachment, the bar to bad behavior remains where the Bush administration and Congress have placed it—beyond the event horizon—and we're dependent entirely upon the good sense of future administrations not to repeat this one's excesses.
Because without impeachment, there are no consequences, and no accountability. Democratic leaders do their colleagues, their constituents and their country an enormous injury by rejecting it.
Cross posted at BTC News