By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, September 26, 2019
I suppose it is no secret that I never thought Donald
Trump should have been elected president of these United States in the first
place. He’s dim, dishonest, and doddering, both intellectually and morally
unfit for the office.
But: He was elected.
And, contrary to the endless litany of Democratic
complaints, he was legitimately elected. You may not like the way we elect
presidents through the Electoral College — I do; if anything, I think the
Founders erred on the side of making the presidency excessively democratic in
character, with the disastrous results we see before us today — but the
Electoral College was not invented in 2016, and it was not created to frustrate
the ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some Russians posted some bulls**t on
Facebook. The votes were what they were.
There are a few different ways to react to that. The
thing that a normal political party in a normal country with a functioning
political culture would do would be to crawl under the porch for a couple of
days to recuperate, admit that your candidate was terrible and ran a terrible
race with terrible advisers, and start looking around for somebody to do better
next time. You might even — if you were smart and in possession of a reasonable
degree of intellectual honesty — ask yourselves what it was about that other
guy that some voters liked so much.
That’s one thing you could do. Or you could come over and
sit on my front porch and hear more than you probably really wanted to hear
about the inevitable decadence of mass democracy, which may shine for a moment
but “soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” And we would laugh a little at
all the diehards on my street with their “Beto for Senate” signs up in their
yards, still, after all this time.
That’s another thing you could do. Or you could insist
that the 2016 election was illegitimate, not because of any real procedural
questions but because of its outcome. And that, more or less, is what Democrats
did. It is worth keeping in mind that the effort to impeach Donald Trump began
before he was even sworn in, with
Senator Elizabeth Warren et al. beginning to lay the legal groundwork in
December of 2016.
Since that time, there have been demands to impeach Trump
over this or that real or imagined offense every few weeks. This is Red Queen
politics: sentence first, trial later. The Democrats have a solution in mind —
impeachment — and have been searching since Election Day 2016 for a problem to
which to apply it.
This week’s renewed enthusiasm for impeachment would be a
great deal more persuasive if it were not No. 6,782 in a series. Democrats want
to impeach Trump for leaning on the Ukrainians about the Biden’s family’s shady
dealings — and they are shady — with that corrupt regime and its sycophants.
Before that, they wanted to impeach Trump because favor-seekers book rooms in
hotels with his name on them. Before that, they wanted to impeach him because of
his Twitter habits. Etc.
The cynic in me guesses that the Ukrainian gambit serves
a dual purpose: First: It provides a pretext for a pre-election impeachment
inquiry against the incumbent president — which, given the current composition
of the Senate, is unlikely to end in action before the election, or after that,
either, unless there is a Democratic majority seated in the Senate. Second: The
likely collateral damage to Joe Biden probably is not entirely unwelcome in
some Democratic circles — he already is sliding vis-à-vis Senator Warren, and
to many Democrats he already has the look of a likely loser should he be the
nominee. If somebody has to be put on an ice floe, it’s going to be Joe Biden.
There are many problems with this approach, one of which
is this: Americans in possession of even a modest political memory must recall
that not only did Democrats insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate,
they also insisted that the last election that brought a Republican to the
White House was illegitimate. There was talk of impeaching George W. Bush, too
— talk that was endorsed by, among others, Donald Trump, who was a donor to
Mrs. Clinton’s campaigns before he became her tormentor. For the Democrats,
there is only one kind of legitimate presidential election: one where they win.
Democrats did not decide to try to impeach Trump in
September 2019 because he apparently saw Peter Schweizer on Fox News (the
president name-checks Schweizer, the author of Secret Empires: How the
American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,
along with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, in his tweeted apologia) and then
brought up the Bidens with the Ukrainians. Nor is it necessarily improper for
the administration to be investigating a potential political rival: The
Trump campaign itself was the subject of an investigation conducted under the
Obama administration. And there was nothing obviously improper about that,
either.
No, the Democrats had long ago decided to try to impeach
Trump, and they decided to do so in December 2016 — because he won. There’s no
point pretending otherwise.
The Democrats have a funny habit when it comes to
elections: When they win, they act like they’ll never lose again, and when they
lose, they act like they’ll never win again. And their strategies reflect that.
The cynical politicization of the judicial confirmation process seemed like a
good idea to them back when Ronald Reagan was riding high and Robert Bork
looked like an easy target, but when Republicans one-upped them in the matter
of Merrick Garland, they cried foul. Making impeachment inquiries an ordinary
part of daily partisan politics may look smart to congressional Democrats right
now, and to Democratic presidential aspirants.
But there will come a time when it doesn’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment