The Perils of Rushing

By Rich Lowry

Friday, January 15, 2021

 

The House dispensed with every ordinary procedure around impeachment this week and wrote an article on the fly and passed it immediately.

 

The rush is understandable in one sense — Trump’s offense was grave, and if the House had hewed to anything like regular procedure it wouldn’t have impeached Trump until after he left office, which it wanted to avoid.

 

If the point of the exercise was simply to impeach Trump a second time, the rush isn’t a problem. Trump is, indeed, impeached a second time. But if the House actually wants to get a conviction in the Senate, I believe it’s going to regret how it’s gone about this.

 

The article is sloppily written, and taking a day or two to have hearings with Republicans taking shots at it might have prompted Democrats to tighten up the text before putting it on the floor. It also might have made Democrats aware of facts that clearly none of them knew when they voted on Wednesday. As an extensive New York Times breakdown demonstrates, the rioters were at the Capitol and fighting with police before Trump finished speaking. This hardly puts Trump in the clear (he still urged the crowd to come to Washington, fed it a steady diet of lies, etc.), but it’s good reason not to focus the article so much around incitement and make it sound like it was only after Trump spoke that the crowd decided to head to the Capitol and ransack the place.

 

At the very least, Democrats should have had someone who doesn’t agree with them red-team the language, which in places sounds like it was pieced together from CNN chyrons.

 

Now, some Republican senators are going to look past this and apply a “we know what they were getting at” test to the article. But a Murkowski or Collins aren’t going to be decisive. The House should have had in mind how to make it as easy as possible for, say, a Shelby or a Tillis to vote to convict, and this article makes it harder.

 

In general, it’s difficult to see the Senate convicting, and as a political matter, this effort easily could go completely wrong. There is a colorable constitutional argument that you can’t impeach and try a president once he has left office. This will create a pall of illegitimacy around the proceeding for many Republicans, if it’s not there already. Regardless, once Trump leaves office, impeachment will inevitably lose political oxygen. Finally, barring Trump from office, no matter how justified, will strike Republicans as vindictive and undemocratic.

 

All of this will create a Republican backlash such that the only one who may emerge politically stronger at the end of the process is Donald Trump.

 

This is why one Republican senator suggested to me the other day that a good option would be for Pelosi to pocket the article and for the House and Senate to pass censure resolutions. Such a course would pile a big bipartisan rebuke on top of the impeachment, while avoiding all the downsides of a trial leading to another acquittal, most especially strengthening Trump for the intra-Republican fights to come.