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How to Talk About Impeachment
The economy is foremost in voters’ minds, but if presidential corruption harms the economy, there is only one recourse.
by Bill Scher
Click here to read this article at washingtonmonthly.com.
Last week, during a town hall in Marietta, Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff
told a constituent supportive of impeaching and removing President
Donald Trump, “There is no doubt that this president’s conduct has
already exceeded any prior standard for impeachment by the United States
House of Representatives,” and “the only way to achieve what you want
to achieve is to have a majority in the United States House of
Representatives and … believe me, I’m working on it every single day.”
Conservative outlets, eager to take some heat off Trump, quickly pounced on Ossoff’s comments. The Wall Street Journal editorial board argued,
“Mr. Ossoff would do better to ask why, with Mr. Trump declining
already in the polls, Democrats are even less popular? Could it be that
voters see that Democrats haven’t learned anything from their November
defeat and are again defining themselves merely by their hatred of
Donald Trump?”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, during a Sunday CNN interview,
was asked if he agreed with Ossoff. Schumer avoided a direct answer.
“President Trump is violating the rule of law in every way,” he
acknowledged, but “two years is too far away to predict” what might
happen with impeachment.
Schumer
doesn’t deserve another pile-on. He has reason to be risk-averse. For
Democrats to take back the Senate in 2026, they must win in at least
three states that Trump won. Swing voters in red states largely want
help with their cost of living and probably aren’t interested in much
impeachment talk.
Yet
there is a fundamental illogic in Schumer’s two-step. If a president is
“violating the rule of law in every way,” what is the case for not
impeaching?
According to the Journal
editorial board, the argument against impeachment is that impeachment
would “die in the Senate, further defining impeachment down.” But
failure in the Senate is not what would define impeachment down. Crassly
political, illegitimate articles would define impeachment down. A
strong case for conviction that fails to win a two-thirds Senate vote
would only define down those who voted to acquit.
Because
Schumer’s answer doesn’t put the impeachment question to bed, it will
continue to be asked. What’s a better answer that doesn’t expose
Democrats to charges of being crassly political?
It’s not that complicated.
First, keep economic concerns at the center:
We already have reason to believe Donald Trump is inflicting needless
economic harm on average Americans while corruptly enriching himself,
his family, and his friends.
Ossoff,
who faces a tough re-election campaign next year in the purple state of
Georgia, hammered Trump for “grift and kleptocracy” during a recent MSNBC
interview, connecting to the economic reality most people are
experiencing without mentioning impeachment. Anticipating a contest
against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ossoff charged, “Donald
Trump’s hand-picked candidate to challenge me for that Senate seat in
Georgia is executing magnificently timed stock trades around these
tariff announcements while my constituents in Georgia are seeing their
401(k)s get absolutely clobbered.”
But,
if you are accusing the president of grift and kleptocracy, the
impeachment question will often follow. Democrats may not need to lead
with the impeachment argument, but they still need an answer when asked
that makes sense.
So second, show that Democrats are not the ones injecting politics into the oversight process: Despite
evidence of flagrant corruption, the Republican-controlled Congress Is
not performing any meaningful oversight of the executive branch.
It just so happens that there is a lot of evidence of corrupt behavior in broad daylight.
The New York Times this week summed up the sordid state of affairs:
Mr.
Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for
him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company
or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other
business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that
have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.
The
firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased
centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between
private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent
in modern American history.
Mr.
Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s
top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his
presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in
some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding
crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
And Thursday’s New York Times quoted the manager of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business as saying a fund backed by Abu Dhabi would be making a $2 billion business deal with the Trump firm’s digital currency.
In early March, Senator Chris Murphy
gave a floor speech listing “20 or so examples of corrupt behavior in
the first six weeks of the Trump presidency,” including several cases of
conflicts of interest involving Elon Musk, several cases of Trump and
administration officials making money off of merchandise sales, and the
use of the White House to negotiate an agreement between Saudi Arabia’s
LVI Golf and the PGA Tour because “the Saudi golf league plays
tournaments at Trump’s courses in the United States.”
Murphy also flagged a shocking executive order from Trump suspending enforcement of the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. One month later, Trump’s Treasury Department announced the suspension of enforcement of the anti-money laundering Corporate Transparency Act.
Trump’s
tariff policies—which have upended the economy and imposed new taxes on
imported goods—also raise concerns about potential corruption. Senator Elizabeth Warren and several dozen congressional Democrats recently sent a letter
to Trump administration officials noting that Trump has begun doling
out tariff exemptions to—and boosting the stock prices of—corporations
with easy access to him, and “the off-and-on nature of President Trump’s
tariffs opens the door to rampant insider trading.” The letter also
calls attention to what looks like a classic fox-guarding-the-henhouse
move: the naming of United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to
simultaneously serve as the Acting Director of the Office of Government
Ethics
Despite all the smoke suggesting an inferno of corruption, prejudged guilt makes the impeachment look politically motivated.
That’s why, third and finally, Democrats should stress that they will not impeach on Day One or embark on a partisan fishing expedition: We
will perform our oversight obligations, investigate where there is
evidence of potential crimes and violations of oath of office, and
impeach if the evidence demands it. Otherwise, accountability for
transgressions is not possible.
The
Supreme Court left us with little choice but to impeach if we have
evidence of a crime. Several of the above examples of suspicious
activity involve official acts. Last year, the Court decreed that the President has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,”
which, in effect, leaves the impeachment process as the only way to
hold a president accountable for official acts that violate the
Constitution or the law.
A
first-term argument against impeachment—that the ultimate
accountability would happen at the ballot box—also doesn’t fly now since
we are in Trump’s second term. Congressional impeachment is it.
The Wall Street Journal
editorial lectures Democrats not to define themselves “merely by their
hatred of Donald Trump.” Such a charge would only stick if there were no
obvious reason to pursue an impeachment investigation. Yet, we are
drowning in reasons.
The Journal
should be more concerned that Republicans are defining themselves
merely by Donald Trump, who is getting more and more unhinged and less
and less popular by the day. One could even make the case that
impeachment and removal could help
Republicans by elevating Vice President J.D. Vance to the presidency
and allowing the GOP to shed the Trump albatross. (Trump would only get
removed by a two-thirds Senate vote if his job approval completely
cratered with voters, including Republicans.)
Democrats
should define themselves as advocates for a stable economy, opponents
of corruption, and stalwart defenders of the Constitution and the rule
of law. If all that leads to impeachment, so be it.
Bill Scher is the Politics Editor at the Washington Monthly. |