Alexandra F. Baldwin
As the Trump presidency spirals further and further into a black hole of petulant insults, possible felonies and too-close-to-treasons-for-comfort, talk of impeachment grows daily. Republicans in the House and Senate are beginning to waver in their unconditional support for the President, subpoenaing potentially incriminating documents and discussing the scenarios under which they might consider impeachment. Ross Douthat went even further (and less plausible) in the New York Times this morning and suggested that Trump’s cabinet should be considering a 25th Amendment solution that would work even faster than impeachment. There was even a Misfits discussion last night about whether or not the Republican Party might actually benefit by impeaching a man who was the fairly chosen nominee of their party before he was the freely elected President. (It should be noted…most of them disagree with much of what I have to say here;-))
It almost makes one long for the halcyon days of March when we worried only about inane policies forwarded by incompetent and uncoordinated political operatives. I am no fan of Trump. I’ve written at length about his ill fitness to hold this office, his moral and ethical vacancy and the dangers he poses to the country and its institutional norms. I will never understand how a thinking person could have walked into a voting booth, checked his name and thought “This is a man that I think should be our President.” He is a festering abscess on the Constitution’s forehead. In my view, nothing bad can come from having almost anyone else sitting in that chair. There is, however, an awful lot of bad that comes from removing him from office, especially for the people that have to actually cast the votes for removal, and I would suggest that we are a lot further from impeachment proceedings than is being widely suggested. {Now watch: tomorrow, Trump will put Yellowstone into an LLC controlled by Roman Abramovich; a Cypriot Holding Company owned by Barron will pay 15 Rubles for the Tseleevo Golf and Polo Club and the Metropol Hotel; and he'll issue Executive Orders firing Sonia Sotomayor, Elizabeth Warren, Rosie O'Donnell and Mark Zuckerberg just to prove me wrong}. Why did Donald Trump win a Republican primary in which virtually the entire party establishment was opposed to his candidacy from day one? Yes, I know that there were a dozen credible candidates fighting for limited attention and that Trump benefited from billions of dollars in free media. All of that contributed, but never lose sight of the primary reason that Trump won the Republican primary: because rank and file Republican voters wanted him to be their nominee. That started in New Hampshire, where he beat his nearest competitor by 20 points and nearly matched the total of the next three highest vote-getters combined. It continued in South Carolina where he tallied 50% more votes than each of the two co-runners up, and on Super Tuesday when he again lapped the field (final results are somewhat skewed by Ted Cruz’s strong home-state showing in Texas. Discounting that, Trump again had over 50% more votes than his closest pursuers). And finally, it ended in Indiana where Republican voters faced a very clear and straightforward referendum on Trump as the nominee, along with 4:1 spending advantage and the endorsement of Cruz by Governor Mike Pence. A majority of those voters chose Donald Trump as their nominee. Republican voters chose Trump, and they did so knowing that the “Party Elites™” did their best to scuttle his candidacy. He may be the least popular nominee in recent history, and the nominee who got the smallest portion of his party’s vote, but that doesn’t change the unavoidable: Trump was the choice of the GOP. This is important for two reasons. First, there is already revisionism among some Republicans seeking to distance themselves from Trump by noting that he is not really a Republican and not really a Conservative. These are both easily defensible positions and also wholly irrelevant. Many of those voices have been consistently saying this since the summer of 2015 and some of them even withheld support of Trump in the general election, but another portion were either Trump supporters, reluctant Trump voters or passive enablers. None of that matters now, though, because the political reality for all of them is clear: Trump is theirs, and they will suffer the fallout of his failures. In 2018, 33 Senate seats and the entire House will be contested, and the removal of a President from office will be a drag of almost immeasurable weight for Republicans. It may be a very favorable electoral map in the Senate (although more of this later), but GOP Congresspeople are going to need a lot of swing votes in a lot of places if they hope to retain control of the House. Asking for those votes immediately on the heels of a Presidential disgrace tied to your party? Good luck. It is, of course, worth noting that asking for those votes on the heels of not impeaching Trump is not going to be particularly easy, either, but my instinct says that voters who feel that strongly are already lost to the GOP in 2018, regardless of their decisions on Trump. The strawman that would hold inaction against a candidate is likely to also hold Trump's failures against the same candidate. The second reason is that the Senators and Representatives who would vote to impeach Trump have to go back to those same voters that elected him and ask for their jobs back. If you believe, as I do, that most elected officials actions can be easily predicted if you simply ask what action is most likely to preserve their job, then the biggest barrier to impeaching Trump becomes clear. Many of those voters already think that Trump is their ally and that the Globalist Party Elites are working against their chosen President. An impeachment certainly won't change that dynamic. Trump’s approval rating may have dipped below 40%, but it is not hard to figure that a Republican seeking a seat in Congress in 2018 is going to need the support of almost all of that 40%. Those voters will need to form the base of Republican support in any election against a (likely invigorated) Democrat opponent, and trying to do that after impeaching the President they liked is asking for trouble. It is, at a minimum, not something that a denizen of Congress concerned more with his own job security than any sense of morality will do lightly (is it a coincidence that the retiring Jason Chaffetz appears to be the most willing to confront Trump on this?) Remember that friendly Senate map? In late November, Republicans looked at Democratic seats in states that Trump won – Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Missouri, Florida, North Dakota and Montana – and dreamed of riding his new populist popularity to gains in the Senate. That applied not only to the rank and file, but to the Congressmen who stand as the most likely challengers for those Senate seats. There was legitimate concern that Joe Manchin would have to switch parties if he wanted to keep his seat in WV. And now, six months later, we think that the GOP is going to have any success by trying to appeal to voters who picked Trump over the establishment’s objections and were then overruled by that same establishment? Of course not…impeaching Trump very likely will kill all of those hopes (which, to be fair, Trump may kill on his own anyway). Pretty simple exercise in the pure politics of this: what do Democrats hope that Republicans in Congress do with Trump? There are no cautionary voices on the left saying “Gee, we have a better chance to win in 2018 if we don’t impeach him.” They know that impeaching Trump almost certainly delivers them the House in 2018 and improves their chances at winning the Senate AND the Presidency in 2020. If something is good politics for Democrats, it is almost by definition bad politics for Republicans. All of this adds up to what should be an obvious idea: that Congressional Republicans are not going to impeach Donald Trump unless they absolutely positively have to do so in order to save their own jobs. And saving their jobs relies most heavily on voters who still view the President favorably, and in many cases sympathetically. They are most certainly not going to impeach based on an account of an already-controversial former FBI Director that would be almost impossible to corroborate. It is entirely possible that Trump has already done significant harm to the party, and I am certain that there are some GOP members who view impeachment as an important step in repairing that damage. I tend to think they are right, but impeachment isn’t a decision to be made for the good of the party, it is to be made for the good of the careers of the elected officials who would vote on said impeachment. And it will almost certainly be very bad for them. In other words: don’t hold your breath.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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