By Jim Geraghty
Friday, January 08, 2021
When keen minds like Andy
McCarthy and Dan
McLaughlin are wary of impeachment, proponents like myself ought to pause,
consider their arguments, and contemplate whether their wariness is a warning
to be heeded.
The concern about what precedent is being set is a
legitimate one, although I’d note we’re already in uncharted territory. Just
about every president who didn’t win reelection was upset about his loss, and
Donald Trump isn’t
the first candidate to wonder if the results were entirely legitimate and that
the right man had won. But he is the first president to hold a rally
and rile up his angry supporters in Washington, D.C., the day Congress
certifies the election results, and we’ve never seen a presidential transition
marred by something as appalling and chaotic as Wednesday’s bedlam. Trump told
the crowd that Mike Pence could reverse the outcome of the election, and then tweeted
Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” The angry mob
that ransacked Capitol Hill went through the halls of Congress, specifically
chanting, “Where is Pence?” If that isn’t the sort of action that warrants
an expeditious removal from office, what is? It makes the Ukraine phone call
look like a grammatical error.
Precedents are being set, whether we like it or not. Now
Congress has to decide what precedent it wants to establish for the appropriate
consequence when a president does something like this.
I come closer to the Andy McCarthy position than the estimable Ed
Whelan on the question of whether the 25th Amendment applies to this
situation, at least for now. Ed points out that the president is already being
described by unnamed aides as “mentally unreachable.” (Say, White House aides,
do we really still need to remain anonymous for this stuff? Is that not
alarming enough for you to allow your name to appear in print? What, is this
staffer still hoping for a good letter of recommendation from Trump?) “Mentally
unreachable” does sound close to the Constitution’s description of a
president being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
But . . . it would be easier to draw this conclusion
definitively with sound, on-the-record accounts and specific examples. Is the
president hallucinating? Hearing voices? Seeing people who aren’t there? Is he
threatening to launch nukes or declare martial law? Ignoring or disregarding
advisers, by itself, is not a sign the president has lost his marbles.
Is Trump any crazier today than he was last week, last
month, or last year? There’s crazy as in “mentally ill” and there’s crazy as in
“spectacularly unwise.” As far as we can tell from the president’s increasingly
less frequent public appearances, he is capable of exercising his duties; he
just doesn’t want to do it. We wouldn’t want the bar for removing a
duly-elected president from office to be lowered to “he’s acting weird.”
That leaves impeachment. Dan is completely correct that
“removing Trump from office by a clear, bipartisan action (by Pence, or by a
large number of Republican senators) might possibly avoid tearing the country
apart. But a hotly contested effort to do so would be worse than what we have
now, imposing long-term political damage and possibly inciting more violence
rather than calming the waters.” And Andy is right that “it would be difficult
at this point to impeach a president with anything approaching the legitimate
due process we would want as a precedent for future impeachments.”
But highly abnormal circumstances warrant highly unusual
responses. There’s nothing normal about any of this, so it’s tough to expect
the response from Congress to be “normal.”
And the problem is that not invoking the 25th amendment
and not impeaching Trump means that the congressional response to his actions
this week will be . . . nothing, really. A lot of senators and representatives
denounced Trump and a lot of his staffers and cabinet members resigned,
concluding they couldn’t work in good conscience any longer. We’ve been there
already with James Mattis and John Kelly and Rex Tillerson and H .R. McMaster.
Without a serious congressional response to the
president’s role in the disruption of its duties, January 6, 2021, will become
just another day of Trump being Trump . . . except that it wasn’t. It was much
worse.
Then again, this debate may be moot. Representative
Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, told
CNN the House could vote to impeach Trump “as early as mid-next week.” Talk
about undermining any sense of urgency. Apparently, the president represents a
serious enough threat to the republic that he must be removed, but he’s not
serious enough a threat to get the House of Representatives to work on weekends.
Check the calendar, everybody: The middle of next week
would be January 12 to 14, and the Senate would still need time to hold a
trial. Would there be a point to removing Trump in the final days of his term?
He would still be blocked from running again, and perhaps there is enough of a
consensus that barring Trump from returning to the White House would be
worthwhile.
Removing Trump in a week or so would establish a Mike
Pence presidency that would make William Henry Harrison look like FDR. (I’d
volunteer to write the paragraph on the Pence presidency in the history books. President
Pence took the oath of office, greeted everyone, went to bed, and the next
morning he attended the inauguration of the 47th President, Joe Biden. Pence’s
17-hour presidency was widely regarded as a quiet and scandal-free era, as most
of the country slept through at least half of it.)
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