Within the left, the debate over whether to impeach Donald Trump is usually cast as an argument of politics versus substance: does it make sense to impeach in the face of virtually no chance of removal, or does Congress have the moral responsibility to impeach regardless of whether Republicans will support impeachment? Some want to frame the issue as a simple question, that Congress must simply determine the facts and have a vote based on the facts. But impeachment has always been a political process.
Andrew Johnson was the first president to be impeached. Johnson was a Democrat who had been part of the Unity ticket with Republican Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election. Republicans, who at this time controlled more than two-thirds of both houses of Congress, had never wanted Johnson to be president. In 1867, over Johnson’s veto, the Republican Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from firing a cabinet member without Congressional approval. President Johnson went ahead anyway and fired Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Republican whom Lincoln had appointed. Republicans in the House promptly adopted eleven articles of impeachment, all of which were about the firing of Secretary Stanton and replacing him with another person in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. One could argue that these acts were not impeachable offenses, that the Tenure of Office Act merely nullified President Johnson’s actions, or perhaps even that the Tenure of Office Act itself was unconstitutional, but the Republicans in Congress impeached President Johnson anyway, and ultimately he survived by one vote because five Republicans in the Senate voted to acquit.
Bill Clinton was the next president to be impeached. Articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton enumerated the offenses of perjury and obstruction of justice. President Clinton, of course, had given various answers under oath in his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit that failed to disclose the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, in particular the fact that he had engaged in oral sex with her. When explaining his answers subsequently, he defended his answers as truthful, most famously declaring that they were truthful because “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Republicans concluded that this was sufficient to impeach President Clinton. Newt Gingrich reportedly said that they did so “because we can.”
Although a Congressional committee approved articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, he was never actually impeached. Thus, his situation may not be as enlightening. However, Democrats did control Congress at the time of his impeachment inquiry, and he resigned because Republicans were turning against him. Polls suggested that the American people were largely supporting his removal from office by the time of his resignation.
In every case, political considerations were, at the very least, dominant in the decision to impeach. The moral case for impeachment can be debated in every case, but politics wins at the end of the day. Trump’s case is no different.
Indeed, in all of the talk, whether on television or in newspaper columns, no one debates the merits of the case of whether Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Democrats in favor of impeachment cite the moral case for doing so and argue that Democrats have a moral duty, even in the face of Republican intransigence. Democrats against impeachment argue that the American people will not support it and that it could hurt the Democrats politically, perhaps making it more likely that Trump will be re-elected.
Republicans don’t bother trying to argue that Trump has not committed impeachable offenses. Everyone knows that Trump welcomed illegal help from the Russians in the 2016 election. Everyone knows that Trump illegally directed others to lie to Congress, to commit perjury, and to commit other crimes, including election-law violations and others, to cover up various other misdeeds. This is truly beyond reasonable debate. Indeed, although we frequently hear the refrain of “no collusion,” a term that has no legal definition, and Bob Mueller ultimately concluded that he lacked the evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, a term that does have a legal definition, it doesn’t take much to conclude that we already knew about the collusion long before Bob Mueller delivered his report. We have all known for a long time about the meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russian agents, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. It doesn’t take much inference to figure out what was really discussed at that meeting. The Russians wanted the U.S. to repeal sanctions against Russia, and in return for a promise to do so, the Russians would help Donald Trump get elected. The official reason for lifting sanctions would be to restore the Russian adoption program. This is, of course, a criminal conspiracy. But Mueller opted not to insist on interviewing every person who attended that meeting to acquire possible testimony that would have proved what happened at the meeting. In his report, he stated that he did so because the players may not have known that they were committing a crime. Irrespective of whether one agrees with that reasoning, it led Mueller to conclude that evidence proving the crime was lacking. So Republicans like to point out that Mueller failed to conclude that the evidence proved a criminal conspiracy. But they dismiss all of Trump’s other crimes as“process crimes.” And they argue that Trump should not be impeached because polls show that the American people do not support impeachment. But of course, this is also political.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler, the current chair of the House Judiciary Committee, was on one of the Sunday morning talk shows several weeks ago,and he was asked point-blank whether the consideration of whether to impeach was political, and he replied, “No.” Congressman Nadler then went on to explain that the American people need to be persuaded that impeachment is appropriate. In other words, right after denying that impeachment was political, he explained that the process was, in fact, political. More recently, Congressman Nadler has said that impeachment is a political process.
One could make a case that impeaching Trump would constitute smarter politics. In Nixon’s time, the public did not support impeachment at the beginning of Congress’s inquiry, but sentiment had turned around by the time the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve articles of impeachment against Nixon. One could argue that, if news coverage focused on impeachment every day, with the facts of Trump’s crimes being laid out in detail every day, that public sentiment would turn overwhelmingly against Trump and also against all Republicans who nonetheless vote to protect Trump.
Whether this would occur or not is a matter of debate. There is also a political case to be made that not impeaching but continuing to investigate Trump’s misdeeds is the best way to defeat him in 2020. But ultimately, as Gerald Ford once said, an impeachable offense is whatever Congress deems it to be. And history tells us that the decision to impeach will always be a political one.