Benefits of impeachment:
1. You put an actual spotlight (a giant one) on Trump’s crimes and atrocities, rather than it just dripping day by day in the media, where only a handful of people care. Most of the citizenry has already forgotten most of Trump's worst offenses.
2. You get to get a No Vote from Senate Republicans on record, and then bash the hell out of them in the election for being traitors, whereas if you don’t, they can all just squirrel around and hedge about Trump when convenient.
3. It’s the House’s job to do oversight and hold the president accountable, even if it doesn’t help them politically (which it would). Democrats do better when people trust good governance, that everything isn’t just a cynical political football. When people lose trust that the government can do any of its Constitutional duties, it is always a win for Rightwing anti-government sentiment.
4. It helps fulfill the implied mandate of putting Democrats into power. The #Resistance is (was) supposed to actually RESIST, not let Trump off the hook preemptively. A lot of the base is very angry that Democrats appear to be caving on this just a few weeks after taking office.
5. You clog up the Senate, so that maybe fewer judges can get confirmed, and instead of the conversation being about Trump’s priorities, it is about Trump’s criminality.
6. It looks strong, like Democrats are using whatever tools they can, and like the House actually means something and isn’t just an underling of the Senate.
7. It gives more weight to the investigations, because otherwise you’re just noodling around, since there’s no way those investigations are going to lead to anything real.
8. It sets a precedent that at least someone will hold criminality in the White House to some kind of Constitutional penalty, regardless of whether Trump can be convicted or not. Making the standard “oh, we’ll just beat him in 2020” means that every future Republican president can break the law all the time, they just have to maintain enough popularity to get re-elected, and if so they’re untouchable.
9. History books will show that Trump was impeached, which may mean nothing to him, but does put a black mark on the era of Trumpian fascism that we’re going to be facing for the next 20 years. It still hurts Clinton that he was impeached, and BTW his party lost the next election.
—
The theories here about why impeachment is a bad idea:
1. “It will crowd out the message of the 2020 candidates.” They’re running against Trump. So they can talk about Trump’s crimes as related to impeachment rather than just amorphously. How does it crowd out their message?
2. “You won’t get a conviction in the Senate.” You won’t get anything passed the Senate, probably ever again (unless the Dems nuke the filibuster and pack the courts). You’re just admitting that the Democratic Party is fundamentally useless from now on, because you’re never going to get anything to 60 Senate votes again, let alone 67 votes. It is a comprehensive, permanent surrender to the idea of doing your job.
3. “Trump will get a victory.” Will he? The fact that, on party lines, Republicans don’t convict him after the country sees months worth of lawlessness and abuses of power? What kind of victory is that? He already HAS a victory if Democrats won’t impeach, because he can just say that this means it was a witch hunt the entire time. Apollo Creed won a victory in Rocky I, but everyone watching the movie knows that he actually lost.
4. “It will fire up Trump’s base.” Are you fucking kidding me? Trump has 90% support from Republicans. They’re going to be fired up regardless. Trump can still today say that Democrats are so mean to him, they’re so “tough,” they’ve been investigating him all this time… He is going to fire up his base. There is no extra gear of rage and paranoia that the base doesn’t already experience every day. The base that needs to get motivated are the Democrats, and you don’t do that by ducking from a fight.
5. “He’ll look like a victim.” Now you’ve GOT to be kidding me. Bill Clinton was impeached for nothing. That’s why his numbers went up (and it still did not help him). There is no slice of the country that is not in Trump’s corner already, but that are newly going to decide “Huh, I kinda like this Donald Trump guy, I didn’t before, but he did survive impeachment conviction because his racist clown car of friends voted no. I mean, I didn’t like him putting children in cages and telling Puerto Rico to go fuck itself and calling Nazis ‘good people on both sides’ and stealing from children's health care to pay for his 2000-mile penis extension on the border that no one wants, and I just found out that my taxes went up, but the opposition party was slightly mean to him, so now he’s got my vote.”
6. “Pelosi knows what she’s doing, so la la la, I can’t hear any criticism, she’s a genius.” She insists on PayGo, she ridicules the Green New Deal, she sends her staffer to go kill Single Payer, she wanted Republicans to have input on whether Dems should raise taxes, she’s all for gigantic military budget increases, she goes out of her way to try to censure Ilhan Omar for making completely accurate and courageous comments. Where is the genius? Because she raises enough corporate donor money to be able to keep her caucus in line and thus "count votes" well? Here is how great a job Pelosi has done. She was on the forefront of defunding ACORN in 2010 over complete nonsense, another absolute gift to the Right. Hmmmm, do you think that maybe Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan could have used a group whose chief functions were registering Black voters and fighting voter suppression? Democrats might have cost themselves the 2016 election right there, based on the BRILLIANCE of the 2010 leadership. Great job. Also great to lose hundreds of seats nationwide, for a decade, while still believing that nobody wants any changes to the system and everything is going fantastically, as long as we get rid of Trump. And since impeachment is off the table, we do this --only-- by hoping and praying that the electorate decides to do our job for us, when they didn’t do this in 2016.
—
I am slightly sympathetic to the hypothetical argument that we should wait for the Mueller report and the result of other investigations. I think that it is obvious that there is more than enough evidence to impeach Trump already (and it won’t attain conviction anyway, so there is no risk), but having the full picture is fine and theoretically better. If they decide to impeach in June or September, that would work for me. But it’s a trick. It’s just a way to run out the clock. Pelosi is never going to impeach, just like she didn’t impeach Bush even though she had 2 full years. If she had wanted to keep it as a real option on the table, she would not have said “it needs to have overwhelming bi-partisan support and not be divisive.” Those conditions are utterly impossible to meet. In a few months, there’ll be another excuse and another and another. Just like Single Payer gets excuse after excuse, just like our drone / surveillance / detention policy gets excuse after excuse.
The Democratic Party’s m.o. is not to really tackle our major crises. It is to offer cosmetic bandaids and finger-point blame at Republicans, for craven political gain. Any real change would threaten the jobs of the people who have climbed the ladder into the powerful positions they now have. This is why you will (mark my words) see the Democratic Party, the one that screamed for unity under Hillary (and mostly got it), abandon Bernie Sanders if he is the nominee. They’ll support Howard Schultz before they support Bernie. And the only way they can get away with this is in the fact that the base has no choice. There is no other viable Leftwing party, there is no way to challenge the power of someone like Pelosi (or Schumer) from the Left, there is no way to get real reform, and they know this. Deep down, Trump is not that bad a guy for our leadership to work with, to fund-raise in opposition to, and to stand in juxtaposition to. Hey, even Manchin is better than Trump, which makes him a cause celebre even when he confirms Kavanaugh. Because there’s no choice.
If we don’t impeach Trump, we’re never going to hold any Republican president accountable ever again for anything. What future thing could get someone impeached? Potentially criminal and certainly seditious relationship with a dangerous foreign country, which theoretically could have materially helped elect him into power? Open friendships with brutal dictators all across the world? Obstruction of justice and witness tampering so brazen it is literally done in tweets and in interviews? A lifetime of provable criminality, including mob connections, global money laundering and massive fraud? A giant sex scandal and an illegal payoff, involving a porn star, his newlywed wife and infant son, and his “fixer”? A national emergency declared simply to nullify Congress’s explicit power of the purse? The appointment of the most prima facie flagrantly unqualified Cabinet members ever? Getting illegal security clearance and insider business favors for his children? Gross abuses of power and borderline incitement of violence against protesters and the media? A pardon of someone who violated a federal court order, served no prison time and showed no contrition, just because he was a political ally? What could the next Republican president do that would get him impeached, if Trump, one of the more unpopular and most divisive presidents, who is also the most summarily unqualified and unprepared person ever in office, and literally too stupid to even know that he is breaking the law half the time, is not worthy of impeachment?
Also, are Democrats EVER going to stop keeping their powder dry and actually fight fascism for once, or is this the final white flag for this country? Because what we’ve seen so far from Democratic leadership, aside from a few badass Twitter meme pwns and a few occasional victories of the MSNBC news cycle, is nowhere near “fighting.” Fascism is careening toward us at 1000 miles an hour, and (sorry) having put Hillary Clinton into the White House for a term or two was not going to slow it down by much. The Democrats need to understand the war we’re in, and that it isn’t just “we’ll beat Trump in 2020 and then the forces of good will have prevailed.” It is going to take massive structural reform and almost a total overhaul. And, sorry, Democratic leadership, you’re not it, and you’re not heading that way. And we’re no longer in 1995.