Why Impeachment is Worth Doing Even if it Gets us Mike Pence.

Some people have asked what is the point in impeaching Donald Trump if you will just get Mike Pence for President. 

Others have asked what legal justification there can be for impeaching Trump only when Pence to all appearances seems to have been involved in the Ukraine scheme (along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr).

The answer to that is simple.  In the end, impeachment is political, not legal.  Politically speaking, it just is not possible to impeach the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General.  The idea is simply too absurd to consider, especially since that would make Nancy Pelosi President.

Donald Trump is clearly the evil genius behind the whole Ukraine scheme. 

Donald Trump has also given us more than grounds to remove him under the 25th Amendment (for removing a President unfit for office).  Mike Pence has not.  Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unglued under stress and may burn the whole thing down.  Mike Pence inspires no such fears.

And finally, I will quote Matthew Yglesias on why everyone across the spectrum should vote for Hillary Clinton, with just a few nouns and pronouns changed:

[Mike Pence], for all [his] flaws, has demonstrated a basic level of competence. [He] understands how policy and government work. [He's] not openly racist; [he] hasn't encouraged street violence. There's no risk that [he] would disrupt the international order or cause an economic crisis out of pique. 

That's a really, really low bar. But it's the only bar [he] has to clear in this contest.

And a Brief Comment on Elizabeth Warren's Campaign

Donald Trump has so many faults, and is such a master of projection, that almost anything he accuses his opponent of, he is guilty of by a factor of many.

During the last election, he accused Hillary Clinton of mishandling classified information, evading disclosure laws, and using her foundation as a slush fund.  Meanwhile, he had a longstanding history of using his foundation as a slush fund and evading disclosures of all kinds.  The only reason he had never mishandle classified information was that no one was so crazy as to allow him access to it.*  Conor Friedersdorf wisely commented:

Absurdly, many seem to have convinced themselves that Trump, who won’t release his tax returns, as every presidential candidate has for decades, will be better on transparency; that a man whose finances we don’t even know, who used his charitable foundation to illegally funnel money to an attorney general investigating him for fraud, will be better on conflicts of interest; that an erratic man who blurts all manner of things out on Twitter and has shady ties to Vladimir Putin will somehow be a more trustworthy guardian of classified information.

He denounced Hillary Clinton as "Crooked Hillary."  At the same time that Trump University was facing a multi-million dollar fraud lawsuit.  Any number of investigations into Trump Enterprises has raised evidence that it was based on fraud.  He has also run a series of resorts and steered business to then while serving as President, abused classification procedures to hide politically embarrassing phone calls, intervened to obtain security clearances for cronies, and blurted out code-word level information to Russian delegates.  Also, the latest scandal has revealed that State Department employees involved were sending messages on private servers, which the last election established as the most heinous offense and American can commit.

In the current election, Joe Biden, the current front runner, has been accused of having retrograde attitudes on race and being too touchy-feely with women.  Somehow this is supposed to make us prefer an open race-baiter who brags about routine sexual assault.  And now Trump is denouncing Joe Biden because his son used his family name to obtain business opportunities. 

Kamala Harris has been denounces as an overzealous prosecutor.  Amy Klobuchar has been denounced as an abusive boss. 

But of Elizabeth Warren, Team Trump has finally come up with accusations that can't be turned against him.

It seems a safe assumption that Trump has never sought to benefit from affirmative action by claiming to be anything other than white, and that he has never alleged (truly or falsely) that he lost a job for being pregnant.

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*Some wag commented that Trump was such an obvious security risk that the only way he could ever get clearance was to be elected President.

Why Impeachment is Still Going to Be Partisan

Wow!  Developments on the impeachment have been happening very fast, faster than I could keep up.  My first thought on hearing that a whistle blower had something very inflammatory to report, on someone who was not part of the intelligence community was that it had to be either Donald Trump or William Barr.  Either Trump had done something wildly corrupt, or Barr was doing something abusive in his investigation of the Russia investigation.

The next report was that it was about a phone call with a foreign leader.  The Washington Post listed five known communications with foreign leaders in the five weeks before the whistle blower letter.  The only one that was a phone call was with Vladimir Putin, purportedly about wildfires in Siberia.  So I guessed that it was yet another discussion about how Russia could evade sanctions. 

And just to be clear, plotting with Putin to evade sanctions would be impeachable.  The sanctions were a law passed by Congress.  While agitating for the repeal of a law passed by Congress, or challenging it in court as unconstitutional are perfectly legitimate partisan politics, secretly plotting to evade such a law is as clear and impeachable offense as one could ask for.*  Impeachment in such a case would not look partisan.  The sanctions were passed with the overwhelming support of both parties.  And I thought even Republicans might be persuaded to support impeachment, partly because it was their law as much as the Democrats', and partly because, while Republicans might be willing to tolerate Trump shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, I did not expect them to tolerate an insufficiently aggressive foreign policy.

But all that is moot.  The phone call turned out to be with the President of Ukraine, seeking evidence of dirty dealing by Joe Biden.  And to Democrats this was a bridge too far.  Up till then, Democrats had held out the hope of getting rid of Trump in the next election.  But that presupposed that the next election would be free and fair.  If Trump was plotting with a foreign government to subvert the next election, suddenly events took an altogether different shape.

But it can't possibly look that way to Republicans.  To Republicans, impeaching Donald Trump for looking for foreign dirty on his Democratic rival -- even fake foreign dirt -- is bound to look partisan.  And impeaching him for efforts to win the next election -- even dishonest efforts -- is not going to hold much appeal.

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*And, yes, I do think this means that GWB's policies of indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance were impeachable.

In Defense of the Foregoing

That being said, I can see some defenses of our general ideas about what is and is not impeachable.

First of all, every country in the world does sordid and bloody things in foreign policy.  That are so many sordid and bloody things happening in the world that doing sordid and bloody things is unavoidable.  Civil wars -- even most international wars -- are not fought between good guys and bad guys.  They are fought between bad guys and other bad guys.  The most clear-cut ones are fought between bad guys and worse guys.   No matter what side you take, you will have unsavory allies.  And staying out means passively allowing the worst to happen.

It is also true that every country shows more concerns for its own citizens than for foreign nationals.  And that the U.S. cannot possibly admit everyone who wants to come here.  It is also true that most people assume that in a democratic country, and leader who harms fellow-citizens will be punished by losing the next election.

There is also the matter of upholding the rule of law.  The law is not always clear.  The executive has some, but not unlimited, discretion in interpretation and enforcement.  Donald Trump's Muslim ban was vile.  But it was not expressly illegal until the courts held that it was, and even then it was salvageable with some modification.  A lot of his other actions to limit immigration are dubious at best and have been challenged in court.  If a court holds any of these actions illegal and Trump persists, then his actions will be impeachable.  The same goes for challenges to Obamacare. It is clearly legal to attempt to pass legislation repealing Obamacare.  The penalty will be paid at the ballot box.  (That is why the attempt ultimately failed).  It is also legal to challenge legislation in court, even if the challenge is so weak as to be frivolous. 

Challenging or stretching the law is one thing.  Openly breaking it is another.  Trump almost certainly committed an impeachable offense in telling border security officials to break the law (seizing property to build the wall, automatically denying all asylum requests without hearing) and promising a pardon if they are prosecuted.  But it may be difficult to persuade the officials in question to testify against Trump, and any impeachment action will look like an attempt to criminalize policy differences. 

And finally, how the elite treat each other has a tremendous impact on the general population.

To take an extreme example, a country in which deposed rulers are killed will give rules an incentive to hold onto power at all costs.  It will lead the ruler to spend immense amounts on internal security at the expense of everything else.  It will lead to civil war any time the leader sees his power as threatened.

A country that routinely exiles deposed rulers will create a strong incentive for leaders to loot the treasure and spend a lot of money on foreign real estate to prepare for a future exile.

To move into more realistic territory, a country in which elections are rigged to ensure that the same party always wins is bound to become corrupt and sclerotic, in the manner of Mexico in the heyday of the PRI.  Parties that find themselves systematically shut out of power lose their respect for the democratic process become radicalized in dangerous ways.

A country that is able to subvert freedom of the press is one that destroys an important method for holding leaders accountable and allows corruption to flourish.

A country that makes economic success depend on political favor becomes systematically corrupt -- crony capitalism.  A leader who treats his office as an opportunity to make money is one who has no regard for the public good.

All of these lead to serious problems.  But, it would appear, these problems do not arise overnight.  I feared the results of a Trump presidency, but there is simply no denying that nothing disastrous has happened, at least not to U.S. citizens.  But the integrity of our governing institutions is being undermined, and sooner or later, things will start going down hill for the rest of us.

A Disturbing Thought on Impeachment

I whole-heartedly agree with people who say that any impeachment of Donald Trump must be on narrow grounds.  We should stick to clearly illegal or unconstitutional behavior and not impeach over mere policy differences.

And yet, the thought of what is an impeachable offense and what is a mere policy difference is disturbing.  Consider:


Mere policy differences, not impeachable:

• Precipitously withdrawing our troops in Syria and leaving the Kurds to be slaughtered.
• Supporting Saudi Arabia's murderous war on Yemen.
• The Muslim travel ban.
• Pressing for a no-deal Brexit with all resultant damage to the British economy.
• Separating parents and children at the border, and detaining asylum seekers until hearing.
• Requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their applications are processed.
• Attempts to role back protections for Dreamers.
• Gross incompetence in responding to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
• Supporting a repeal of Obamacare that could have stripped tens of millions of people of their health insurance.
• Arguing for the courts to declare Obamacare unconstitutional, strip millions of their health insurance, and take protections from people with pre-existing conditions.
• Seeking to precipitate a fiscal crisis that will force massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
• Ending environmental regulations and raising the likelihood that the planet will cook.
• Nor would it have been impeachable if Trump had blundered into a war with North Korea and ended up with West Coast cities being nuked.

Things that might be impeachable:

• Diverting funds from military projects to build the border wall.
• Telling immigration officials to disregard laws and he would pardon them.
• Abuse of anti-trust laws to punish media companies that criticize him.  
• Attempts to fire Robert Mueller and other officials investigating Trump's ties to Russia.

Impeachable offenses:

• Use of federal office the profit Trump Enterprises.
• Possible foreign (and domestic) policy decisions based on personal financial interests.
• Basing foreign policy on other countries' willingness to assist him against political rivals.
• Stonewalling all attempts at Congressional investigation.

Is it overly cynical to say that what our ruling elites do to ordinary citizens, and especially to foreigners, is a mere matter of policy, while what our ruling elites do to each other is impeachable?