House Democratic leadership and impeaching Trump

Greg Sargent reminds us that the Pelosi-Hoyer strategy of opposing impeachment of Trump has its own risk. "Playing it safe" has risks, too. Nominating Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2016 was playing it safe. Obama and the Democrats not making a major and contiual fuss about the Republicans refusing to act on Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination was playing it safe, because of course Hillary would win the 2018 election.

A German version of this post is here.

Part of the justification for the Pelosi-Hoyer impunity-for-Trump position is based on the fact that after the House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in 1998, the Democrats did unusally well in the midterm elections that year. Conventional wisdom spins this as impeachment having hurt the Republicans.

Which is true so far as it goes. But the Democrats weren't entirely passive in that impeachment fight. On the contrary, the Democrats showed an unusual willingness to fight the Republicans when they proveeded with impeachment. This not only made people aware of the frivolousness of the charges and the unsavory nature of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr and the Republicans leading the impeachment charge in the House. It also showed Democratic voters the unusual sight of Democrats actually fighting for their own side in a very visible way.

That's also known as energizing the base. That also is very good for winning elections.

Not fighting for your own side when pretty much every voter in your party can see that there are extremely good reasons to fight - that's not quite as inspiring for voters. It tends to remind them of the one true thing David Frum ever said, "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010) Conveying that message to the press ad the public is not a good way of boosting Democratic electoral turnout.

Sargent (Democratic equivocation over impeachment is a moral and political disaster Washington Post 04/19/2019) writes that the Democratic leadership arguing against impeachment while "not seriously arguing that all the misconduct that has now come to light does not merit an impeachment inquiry" is "creating a situation that’s shaping up as a moral and political disaster".

Hoyer did make a weak attempt to sound like a serious legislator in this tweet:

Congress must have the full report & all underlying evidence in order to determine what actions may be necessary to ensure that the Congress & the American people have all the info they need to know the truth & all options ought to remain on the table to achieve that objective.

— Steny Hoyer (@LeaderHoyer) April 19, 2019

You don't have to parse too hard to notice that giving the public "all the info they need to kow the truth" is very different than holding the President responsible for "high crimes and misdemeanors" committed in the most powerful official government office. Taking the House's Constitutional responsibility seriously looks different than this.

I'm going to take a deep breath here and state the most sympathetic version of the Pelosi-Hoyer case that I can muster. Trump is unpopular. The midterms in 2018 were an historic success for the Democrats, with some astonishing turnout numbers, boosted not least by the mobilization of female voters against Trump's woman-hating and generally reactionary politics. Pelosi and Hoyer are looking at the experience of 2006-8, when Democrats also retook control of the House in the midterms and the Republicans lost the Presidency. Trump is good for fundraising, as Pelosi as explicitly noted publicly, and the current leadership wants to boost a traditional party-directed, media-heavy campaign approach. Better to focus on the obvious weaknesses and unending production of scandals by the Trump Administration and not risk putting off some swing voters by drawing too sharp of a Democratic profile behind innovative measures like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. After all, the Pelosi-led House strategy in 2007-8 was pretty much that, and the Democrats did very well in the Congressional and Presidential elections of 2008. Plus, removing Trump by impeachment would put a comparatively unscathed Mike Pence in the Oval Office and presumably as the 2020 Presidential candidate.

As I said, that's the most generous way I could spin their position. There are always arguments for "playing it safe" in a high-stakes situation like this. Sometimes, they are even good ones.

Sargent spells out the unavoidable duck-and-cover appearance of the Pelosi-Hoyer position:

... Democrats have also suggested that an impeachment inquiry should be avoided until Republicans grow convinced that removal is merited, because without that an inquiry would divide the country or isn’t worth doing because the Senate wouldn’t ever convict.

But this, too, is fatally flawed. It gives Republicans veto power over even the question of whether to launch an inquiry. Importantly, an inquiry is not a decision whether to impeach or not. Rather, it initiates a long, deliberative fact-gathering process that is designed to ultimately inform that decision.

Thus, this rationale is an evasion and a dereliction of institutional duty on its face: It takes the very possibility of making a deliberative decision on whether impeachment is appropriate off the table entirely, simply by virtue of the fact that at the end of the process, Republicans will never acknowledge that it is, for reasons that have nothing to do with the known facts about Trump’s misconduct.

In short, it allows Republicans to dictate that the question isn’t even worth a serious effort to answer. [my emphasis]

He's right. It's not only an extremely serious dereliction of Constitutional duty. It's also an explicit surrender of the Democratic leadership to the hyper-partisan Republican Party.