By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, April 28, 2019
The Mueller investigation was supposed to be a legal
process concerned with crimes. Investigators identified no crimes to charge,
and so it has, naturally, become something else: no longer a theory about a
criminal conspiracy — only an irritable mood.
An ordeal that had been conducted under the procedures of
law in accordance with legal criteria is now an ordeal that is being conducted
under the procedures of politics in accordance with political criteria — or, if
you prefer, with moral criteria related to Donald Trump’s character. For those
who want to see President Trump impeached and who think of impeachment as a
fundamentally political process in spite of its mock-trial aspect, that’s just
fine. They’ll take their pound of flesh, however it is had.
The problem with this point of view is that the question
of Donald Trump’s personal fitness for office already has been adjudicated as a
political matter: That is what
happened in the 2016 presidential election. Many critics, myself included,
argued that Trump was unfit for the office, both morally and intellectually. We
made our arguments, the voters consulted their own consciences, and, weighing
these things however it is that voters weigh them, chose Trump. There wasn’t
some occult intermediary step in there. That’s how things go in politics: The people
behave just as if they had minds of their own! And, sometimes, they get to have
their own way.
In terms of Donald Trump’s character and habits, there is
practically nothing in the Mueller report — or in the public record since 2016
— that voters did not already know when they elected him. And that is really
the fundamental argument against impeaching President Trump: The political judgment called for in an
impeachment at this point and in this context properly ought to be understood
as beside the point, if we take seriously the democratic assumption that the
judgment of the people, rendered in the election, is sovereign.
There isn’t some shocking new thing, and, of course, some
Democrats have been talking impeachment since before Trump was even sworn in.
The Democrats do not propose to impeach Donald Trump for high crimes and
misdemeanors, but simply for being Donald Trump. One may sympathize with that,
but Donald Trump is the man the voters chose.
And that goes to the real issue here: The Democrats
cannot accept that they lost an election to Donald Trump. One sympathizes with
that, too, but that is what actually happened, for several reasons: Trump
focused on two issues — immigration and trade — that speak to a substantial
bipartisan plurality with nationalistic and protectionist impulses rarely taken
seriously by mainstream figures in either party; his opponent ran an inept
campaign and has been questing after power for so long that both she and the
voters are exhausted by it; the “elites” and Washingtonians against whom Trump
& Co. inveigh were judged, not without some reason, to merit a trip to the
woodshed; the so-called war on terror and the financial crisis of 2008–09 have
destabilized formerly sturdy political coalitions. And, of course, it was
Republicans’ turn.
Which is to say: The Democrats’ talk of impeachment is
partly about 2020, but it’s mainly about 2016, and their adolescent psychic
need to believe that the presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the
White House was illegitimate rather
than an opportunity they simply blew. The theory that the election was thrown
by Russian trolls posting dank memes on Twitter is hard to take seriously. If
we had a list of every voter whose mind was changed in 2016 by an anonymous
social-media account with a Cyrillic bio, then disenfranchising those voters
would be a good start on improving things for 2020. Alas and alack, we don’t do
that sort of thing. But the argument that bot-executed shenanigans nullified
democracy in 2016 amounts to the Democrats protesting: “These trolls robbed us
of the support of our natural base: morons!”
There’s no quality control in social media — and less
quality control in ordinary news media than there used to be. Lies,
distortions, exaggerations, and pure inventions are going to be out there in
the intellectual marketplace, whether they originate in Moscow or in Brooklyn.
That’s a real problem, but it doesn’t invalidate the outcome of the 2016
election.
There are many reasons to oppose an impeachment at this
time: One is that no one has made a very persuasive case for one, all of the
Democrats’ arguments up to this point having been transparently pretextual.
Another is that the Republican majority in the Senate all but ensures that the
process would be purely symbolic, an exercise in chaos for pleasure’s sake. A
third is that it normalizes the invocation of a procedure that should be
reserved for extraordinary circumstances in the service of ordinary short-term
partisan interests. For comparison, consider that there was no serious
impeachment talk when Barack Obama authorized the assassination of U.S.
citizens without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress — or when he took
executive actions that he himself had described as unconstitutional only months
before. That suggests a pretty high standard — and if “I think that guy is a
fink!” ends up being a common rationale for impeachment, then you’d better make
your peace with anarchy, because Washington is going to be a ghost town.
But the most important reason for forbearance here is
that a political judgment already has
been rendered on Donald Trump’s character — and, if you don’t like how that
came out, there’s another chance right around the corner.
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