Why Impeachment Wasn't a Waste of Time

One of the honest questions that people have asked in the wake of this, the third impeachment of a president in our history, is "If the Senate will not convict, what was the point?". It's a good question. In the world of criminal prosecution, often we hear of a District Attorney declining to prosecute someone who has been arrested. If there's no chance that the accused will be convicted, why go through the time and expense of a trial? What this scenario doesn't take into account is that the decision to not prosecute is usually made due to lack of evidence. Despite what the Trumpublicans are saying, there is  a lot of evidence. I can't think of a scenario where a criminal trial is taken off the table due to the lack of impartiality on the part of either the judge or the jurors, so the analogy comparing a Senate impeachment to a courtroom is not very strong.

Since Trump was elected there has been talk about impeachable offenses. There have even been a few frivolous motions by individual Democratic House members to impeach Trump for various reasons. Not, as the Republicans would have you believe, because the Democrats didn't accept the results of the election. It was Trump, not Clinton, who suggested that he would not accept the results if he lost. Not because the Democrats were orchestrating a coup.1 Ever since Trump took office, he has continually flouted rules and norms and acted as if the law did not apply to him. There have been a parade of actions that theoretically could have warranted impeachment, like violations of the emoluments clause, where foreign governments and domestic allies spend their money at Trump properties in order to gain favor with him. Trump himself pushes these properties, most recently his decision (later rescinded) to hold the 2020 G-7 conference at one of them. His behavior during the Mueller investigation certainly suggested  reasons for impeachment. While Mueller's team could not conclusively prove that there was a conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in Russia's election interference, it was established that the campaign was happy to accept assistance. Throughout the investigation Trump actively sought to undermine it. Incidents of obstruction of justice took place on an almost daily basis as Trump first fired the man overseeing the initial FBI investigation and regularly threatening to fire Mueller, and to fire Jeff Sessions for not firing Mueller. There is no doubt that Trump paid off two women with whom he had affairs, arguably because it would affect the election if they came forward.

Despite the Republican moaning about the impeachment being partisan payback for losing the 2016 election, Democratic support for impeachment was almost nonexistent until the Ukraine phone call. Democratic leadership knew that the litany of complaints about Trump were not solid enough to actually begin impeachment proceedings. Even after the Democrats won back a House majority in the 2018 mid-terms, it took an egregious flouting of the law for there to be overwhelming Democratic backing for impeachment.

So why, knowing that the Senate would almost certainly vote to acquit,  did the House proceed with an impeachment inquiry? Why, knowing that Trump would remain in office after impeachment, did they go through all the time and trouble of impeachment?

Because it was their Constitutional duty.

It is the responsibility of the House of Representatives to hold the President accountable when he runs off the rails; it is not their responsibility to only exercise that responsibility when the Senate is willing to do their Constitutional duty.

The phone call with the Ukrainian President and all of the skulduggery surrounding it, was only the latest and most blatant example of a pattern of lawlessness and authoritarianism that Trump has engaged in since before he was elected. Trump has acted with impunity, aided and abetted by his allies and enablers in his administration and in Congress. He has placed his loyalists in positions of authority, the better to shield him from consequences of his behavior, most infamously Attorney General William Barr, who has acted , not as the United States Attorney General, but as Trump's personal lawyer and protector. Republican Senators and House members, fearful that Trump's base would turn against them, defend him no matter what. Allowing this latest and most obvious violation to go unanswered would send a terrible message to the segment of the electorate not enamored by Trump: that Trump really is above the law.

The Ukrainian phone call, no matter what Trump and his sycophantic followers may say, was only perfect in that it was a perfect example of corruption. To put it in perspective, the phone call took place one day after the Mueller testified before Congress to discuss his report, where Trump escaped the judgement that he had colluded with a foreign government to interfere with the election by a technicality. His response, after being cleared of conspiracy because he only passively accepted foreign assistance, was to actively solicit foreign interference. How could the House of Representatives let this stand?

One of the arguments that I have heard is that impeachment is a waste of time and the House of Representatives should spend their time doing what they were elected to do: legislating. This ignores the fact that other business besides impeachment has been taking place. Two omnibus budget bills were passed after extensive negotiations among House Democrats, Senate Republicans and the White House. Trump has been regularly bragging about and taking credit for bills that he has signed, ignoring the fact that these bills came from Congress, including the House of Representatives. Trump has criticized Speaker Pelosi for supposedly sitting on NAFTA 2.0, which he has dubbed USMCA, even though the Democrats have been in negotiations with the White House for months over changes to the agreement. And even though Trump has dubbed the opposition the "Do-Nothing Democrats", they have passed hundreds of bills that are now on hold in the Senate due to McConnell's obstruction. The House Democrats can evidently walk and chew gum at the same time.

The Senate is going to have a trial and they're going to acquit. There's no way that 20 Republican Senators are going to vote to convict. Trump will still be the president. But, the Democrats have sent a message that as far as they're concerned, no one is above the law. This is an important message to send to the electorate as we move into the 2020 primaries in a few months. According to the website FiveThirtyEight's aggregate of various polls,  the support for removal is very close, 47.5% for and 46.1% against. But among Democrats, the support for removal is 83%! Even among Independents, support is 42.4%. These are the people that need to be convinced that the Democrats in Congress are doing their job and who will need to be persuaded to vote for a Democrat for president in November 2020.

The Democrats in the House of Representatives did their job, they did their Constitutional duty, even if the Senate Republicans refuse to do theirs.



1 The Republicans have been able to dig up one quote by an attorney who wrote "#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #Impeachment will follow" - where it is obvious from the context that he is talking about eventual impeachment - this was in response to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates