By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Impeachment is not a judicial process, as my colleague
Andrew C. McCarthy likes to remind us, but a political process with judicial
trappings. That makes it very likely — practically certain — that Democrats
will lose in the Senate, where Republicans have a majority led by Mitch
McConnell, who practically has the adjective “wily” bolted onto his name right
in front of “senator.”
It is easy to underestimate speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi, because she speaks an obscure dialect of High Gibberish and frequently
seems to be confused in public — not that any of that is stopping Joe Biden from
leading the Democratic primary field. Pelosi is clever enough, but lacks the
courage that in politics comes from genuine conviction, which she also lacks,
and that makes her easy to bully. The zany-left caucus in the House — the
left-of-San Francisco caucus — pushed Pelosi to ignore her own better judgment
in order to give the Democrats one of those “moral victories” they keep
proclaiming as Republicans claim electoral ones.
Which is to say, impeachment will be this year’s Beto
O’Rourke vs. Ted Cruz.
President McConnell seems to be enjoying this. (Yes, yes,
I know that Trump is technically
president, but Cocaine Mitch is running the show: Ask Merrick Garland.)
McConnell knows that Pelosi has dealt herself a losing hand, and watching her
and her House colleagues flounder must be amusing to the gimlet-eyed gentleman
from Kentucky.
Pelosi knew that opening an impeachment action against
President Donald Trump was a dumb idea, because simply talking about impeachment would offer about 90 percent of the
political benefit with none of the risk, whereas actually impeaching the
president offered only a near guarantee of final failure. The point of this
impeachment is not to remove Trump from office — everybody knows that is not
very likely to happen — but to denounce him. Democrats victimized by wishful
thinking may have believed that the testimony in the House and the howling
1,000-coyote chorus in the media would turn some Trump voters against him, but,
if anything, both will have the opposite effect, giving the president the two
things his style of politics most needs: a narrative of unfair victimization
and an opportunity to proclaim victory. Trump is not a statesman but a
culture-war WMD, and his admirers are not much interested in any kind of
disarmament, and in unilateral disarmament least of all.
Pelosi apparently hoped to draw things out by refusing to
send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for consideration, thereby
keeping the part of the process she thinks is politically valuable — the Ad Catilinam denunciations and the media
coverage of them — while avoiding the resounding defeat in which this gambit is
all but guaranteed to end.
But Pelosi did not account for the fact that McConnell is
better at this than she is. Parliamentary shenanigans are kind of his thing.
(Again: Ask Merrick Garland.) When Senate Republicans began maneuvering to
dismiss the articles without Pelosi’s sending them over, Pelosi flinched and
announced that she’d submit the articles in the week to come.
So, what was it for?
Trump’s wrongdoing is real and significant, but Pelosi et
al. never had the moral credibility to make a persuasive impeachment case
against him or the political juice to get it done. Democrats were talking about
impeachment before the man was ever sworn in as president, and they remain
emotionally dependent upon their preposterous tale about Russians on Facebook
throwing the election to Trump. (The Russians, for their part, wanted
paralyzing chaos and to destabilize the United States politically — Mission Accomplished, Ivan.) The
Democrats would have been far better off simply telling the truth about Trump’s
failings and challenging him at the polls rather than presenting this as an
apocalyptic drama that cannot wait for an election and resolution on ordinary
democratic terms. Apocalyptic dramas are pretty hard to sell when unemployment
is low, and it is possible to exaggerate the sins of even Donald Trump.
Instead, all Democrats have accomplished is to harden
preexisting partisan divisions and to normalize (or further normalize, if you
like; Newt Gingrich and the GOP Class of ’94 bear some responsibility here,
too) the use of presidential impeachments as an ordinary part of the political
arsenal. Donald Trump is not going to be any better — or any worse — than he
would have been without the impeachment fight. Trump was made for this kind of
mud-wrestling — everybody gets dirty but, like the proverbial pig, he enjoys
it.
Pelosi may have given the Democrats another moral
victory, but McConnell is going to give Republicans an unqualified victory. And
what is the cost of this impeachment misadventure? An even more dysfunctional
government, an even more insipid politics, and an even more bitter and fearful
electorate.
For all the genuine misdeeds of Donald J. Trump, that one
is on Democrats.
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