Another Impeachment Failure

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, February 15, 2021

 

At this point, the second impeachment of Donald Trump over his actions leading up to and during the January 6 Capitol Hill riot generated just about the worst possible outcome. The former president is acquitted again, his fans are outraged that he was tried again, and his foes are outraged that he was acquitted again. The capstone to the debacle arrived Saturday with an inexplicable decision by senators to not hear from any witnesses right after a majority voted to hear witnesses, ensuring that the few Republicans who stood up to Trump or voted for witnesses went out on a limb, and will now face the full wrath of Trump and his supporters, for absolutely nothing.

 

Those of us on the right have grown used to cynically thinking of the Republican Party as uniquely hapless and incompetent. Our friends on the left would dispute the word “uniquely.”

 

Our Congress responded to an attack upon itself with an alternating delayed and rushed impeachment that ends with the same result as before. Trump comes out of this, if not quite strengthened, in no worse shape than he did before the impeachment trial started. American life has already largely moved on. Senate Democrats wanted to move on to Biden’s agenda, and the new administration certainly prioritized its agenda over holding Trump accountable.

 

The blame for Trump’s acquittal starts first and foremost with the 43 Senate Republicans who voted that way. Those Republicans either genuinely believe that Trump did nothing that warranted a historic rebuke, or they genuinely believe the Constitution gives the Senate the authority to convict presidents and bar them from future office but not former presidents. (I guess these Republicans believe that in those final days before leaving office, the president has carte blanche.) In the end, it appears far too many Senate Republicans perceived a vote to convict as career suicide, and they were just not willing to lose their offices over this.

 

Last week I argued that perhaps this would be better settled in a courtroom of the judicial branch. If a prosecutor looks at the evidence and concludes an incitement charge wouldn’t stick, that will settle the matter. If a jury acquits or convicts the president, that will settle the matter.

 

But multiple times in the past two months Democrats, who viewed opposing Trump something akin to a divinely directed mission over the past five years, made spectacularly wrongheaded or cynical decisions. On January 7, the morning after the attack, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer initially announced that the House would adjourn until Inauguration Day. They did reconvene on January 11, and several House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment that day — but the House spent a day on a resolution calling upon Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment — a move that Pence had already made clear he wasn’t willing to make.

 

After waiting six days, Democrats concluded “time is of the essence” and skipped over hearings and the committee process and voting upon the article directly. The impeachment article accused Trump of “inciting an insurrection,” which left too much wiggle room, compared to dereliction of duty.

 

Ten House Republicans voted to impeach, but there’s no indication that Democratic leaders even considered asking them if they wanted to be impeachment managers. (If you want to persuade a Republican lawmaker, you might want a Republican lawmaker to make the argument!) Instead Pelosi picked Eric Swalwell, perceived as an oily partisan hack now notorious for a relationship with a Chinese spy.

 

Then, during the trial, the House impeachment managers were handed a gift-wrapped bombshell witness, in the form of Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, (R., Wash.):

 

Herrera Beutler said she was stunned when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of a conversation he had with Trump on Jan. 6: “He said to the President, ‘You’ve got to hold them. You need to get on TV right now, you need to get on Twitter, you need to call these people off.’ And he said, the President said, ‘Kevin, they’re not my people.’”

 

She said McCarthy told the President, “Yes they are, they just came through my windows and my staff is running for cover. Yeah, they’re your people. Call them off.”

 

Trump’s response, as McCarthy told Herrera Beutler, was, “Well I guess these people are just more angry about the election and upset than you are.”

 

Herrera Beutler said the President’s failure to respond to the Jan. 6 attack was “a dereliction of duty, a violation of his oath of office to protect the Constitution.”

 

“A president who sees an attack happening like this has an oath by his office to do what he can to stop it, and he didn’t.”

 

“I just think you have to take your party perspective out of this,” she explained.

 

Senate Democrats were content with merely inserting her account into the record, instead of calling her or McCarthy as a witness, and letting the whole country hear it from either or both of them, in their own words.

 

As I’ve argued from the start, if you’re going to hold an impeachment trial, hold an impeachment trial. (Napoleon had some thoughts on this sort of thing.) Either you do it, and go all-out, or you don’t. If you think it’s futile because you’ll never convince 17 GOP senators, then dismiss it and move on. If you think it’s worth doing, then do it right — including hearing from witnesses. Don’t leave stones unturned or witnesses and arguments that could move people unturned.