When the Senate Republicans chose Trump over the rule of law, I figured the impeachment card had been played, closing that avenue for protecting the nation. Maybe that’s how it is.
But in the short time since that Senate acquittal -- as we’ve watched this would-be dictator commandeer the Department of Justice to be his own personal force for punishing his enemies and protecting his allies, and now how he’s turning the intelligence community into his own personal instrument even against the clear national security interests of the United States -- it seems necessary to reconsider whether we’re done with using the important instrument of impeachment.
Can we just stand by and let Trump amass more and more of the levers of government to serve his own lust for power and to erode the system designed to give “liberty and justice for all”?
Of course, we have a presidential election coming up in just a matter of months, and it is tempting to say that’s the solution left to us.
A few days ago, Rep. Maxine Waters was asked what the Democrats in Congress can do in the face of Trump’s whole new wave of serious crimes and misdemeanors. I eagerly awaited how Waters would answer — as she was one of the most aggressive members of the House, having said as early as 2017 (as did I) that Trump’s conduct warranted impeachment. But instead, she said that now we must turn to the American people to turn him out of office in November’s election.
If she didn’t envision any important role for the House now, perhaps that means we do have only the election left to deliver us from evil.
But on the other hand, Trump’s new batch of impeachable offenses represent a direct attack on the integrity of that coming election: 1) His using his bag man who calls himself the Attorney General of the United States to attack his potential rivals represents that same cheating in the election that the lead House Manager, Adam Schiff, pointed out repeatedly during the impeachment trial. And now 2) Trump has fired his Director of National Intelligence for having his people inform Congress — as they are legally supposed to do — of how the Russians are working again to help Trump win re-election.
In view of how these crimes call into question whether we can trust our fate to the upcoming elections, it seems necessary to ask: Is Rep. Waters’ response adequate? Isn’t something more forceful required now from those who have power and are not subservient to Trump?
It might be asked: What’s the point of going through the impeachment process again, given that we’ve already seen the utter moral bankruptcy of the Republicans in the Senate, and thus we know — even more clearly than we did before -- that impeachment will not succeed in stripping this dangerous authoritarian of the powers of the Presidency?
An answer might be that the process might be a means to expose still more fully the corruption and criminality of this President. It could expose not only the impeachable offenses he’s committed right before our eyes in recent weeks, but also bring in some of the others of Trump’s many previous impeachable offenses (like his “multiple felonies” of obstruction of justice, and his violations of both the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses in his greedy push to enrich himself from the public treasury). (I had hoped that the previous impeachment process would not confine itself just to actions surrounding the Ukraine scandal.)
Perhaps such fuller exposure would help tip the scales of the election against Trump (and his Republican accomplices).
But it might reasonably be objected that the previous impeachment trial exposed plenty of Trump’s criminality and corruption — even if only in a narrow slice of his conduct -- but did nothing to weaken this lawless President. Indeed, it seems that Trump’s poll numbers actually improved slightly during the time the spotlight was on the Democrats exposing Trump’s misconduct.
What reason is there to believe that exposing his evils more comprehensively will move the American people against Trump? And what reason is there to believe that the Democrats can weaken the Senate Republicans by exposing further their own complicity, as shown for example in their refusal to protect the nation from the Russians’ attacks on our democracy?
I have no great answer to those questions. But if we are to act on the basis of having lost faith in the American people — an understandable temptation in view of the futures markets now giving Trump a 55% chance of being re-elected, even after all that Trump has done right in front of everyone’s eyes — then we’ve pretty well thrown in the towel on American democracy.
If I had to propose to the House Democrats how to deal with this current situation, with Trump acting now like he believes there is nothing to impede his destroying everything that protects American liberty and justice, I would suggest this:
1) hold public hearings into all of these offenses, while discussing publicly whether there is an obligation to once again pick up the ultimate tool to protect our constitutional order, i.e. impeachment;
2) possibly — depending on how circumstances and public opinion unfold — proceed to draw up new Articles of Impeachment, laying out a fuller picture than the previous Articles of how lawless this President has been, and how fundamental a threat to the nation and its Constitution he poses; and then
3) possibly take the course that has been recommended by the eminent constitutional scholar, Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, i.e. to present those Articles to the nation, but not pass them along to the Senate— using that choice to expose once more the complicity of the Republican senators (save for one of them) in this profound threat to the system that has conferred so many blessings on generations of Americans.