By Rich Lowry
Friday, January 24, 2020
It’s easy to forget what the Senate impeachment trial is
supposed to be about.
It’s not a fight over whether the Senate will call a
couple of witnesses that the House couldn’t, or didn’t bother to, obtain on its
own.
The underlying question is whether the United States
Senate will impose the most severe sanction it has ever inflicted on any chief
executive, voting to remove a president for the first time in the history of
the country and doing it about 10 months from his reelection bid.
This is a truly radical step that, if it ever came about,
would do more damage to the legitimacy of our political system than President
Donald Trump’s underlying offense.
If Trump were actually convicted, the 2020 election would
proceed under a cloud of illegitimacy. Tens of millions of Trump voters
wouldn’t accept the result. They’d see it as an inside job to deny the
incumbent president a chance to run for reelection, without a single voter
having a direct say. The GOP would be brought to its knees by internal
bloodletting, a prospect that Democrats surely would welcome, especially given
that it would deliver them the presidency. Republicans would be out for
revenge, and instead of a halcyon return to normalcy, our politics would be
even more poisonous than before.
What’s the countervailing upside? Democrats say that it
is holding Trump accountable. But removal from office isn’t required for that.
Congressional oversight itself is, normally, thought of
as a form of accountability. The House has held hearings that exposed,
sometimes in vivid fashion, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine scheme. Trump has seen
officials working in his own government publicly criticize his conduct, and
polls show that most of the public believe he did something wrong.
Democrats argue that Trump can’t stay in office because
he’s such a threat to the integrity of our elections. But the portrayal of
Trump’s Ukraine scheme as “election interference,” as the Democrats always say,
is tendentious and inapt. If the Ukrainians had complied with the Trump team’s
pressure to announce an investigation of the energy company Burisma, it
wouldn’t have changed one vote in 2020, even if former vice president Joe Biden
eventually is the Democratic nominee.
Trump would have trumpeted such an investigation as proof
of Biden corruption, but it’s not clear that this would have added anything
material to his already fulsome allegations of Biden corruption.
The fact is that impeachment, as my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru
points out, is a weak check on the presidency. It requires a supermajority of
the country to remove a president and one of the political parties being
willing to nullify the choice of its own voters for president and an election
he won. Both the Trump and Clinton impeachments show that this is a hateful
prospect for the president’s party.
The best case for what the Democrats are doing now is
that Republicans impeached Clinton in the 1990s with little or no hope for
conviction in the Senate, and turnabout is fair play. But it’s time to conclude
that this is a failed model of impeachment. It constitutes a censure with bells
and whistles, yet depends on a process that diverts the time and energy of the
nation’s political institutions as if the survival of a presidency were at
stake, even when everyone knows it isn’t.
Congress can hold hearings on a president’s conduct,
subpoena witnesses and documents and fight the executive with full force if
they aren’t produced, hold officials in contempt, produce reports, withhold
funding, deny the executive traditional forms of interbranch comity, and, if it
wants to put down a long-lasting marker, censure the president.
But it needn’t drag the country through a melodrama based
on the fiction that any president who hasn’t crashed to, say, a 25 percent
approval rating is going to be removed by his own party — in other words,
exactly what Adam Schiff and his managers are doing now.
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