BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

In the fall of 1998, Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff, traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with the speaker of the House. Mr. Bowles enjoyed a better relationship with Speaker Newt Gingrich than anyone in the Clinton White House, partly based on a shared Southern heritage and commitment to fiscal conservatism. At the end of the meeting, Mr. Bowles put a very direct question to Mr. Gingrich: Why were the Republicans intent on impeaching Bill Clinton? The speaker replied, “Because we can.”

I had a front-row seat and a small speaking role in the political drama that followed. Now, as the country is gripped by another impeachment debate, many are comparing the two scandals and handicapping what the Democrats might do.

Just as Speaker Gingrich did in 1998, Speaker Nancy Pelosi could direct the impeachment of President Trump because she can. Unlike in 1998, she stands on firmer ground: The Clinton case involved an egregious personal mistake and purported steps to cover it up; the Trump case involves an effort to thwart an investigation into a foreign attack on our democratic system.

Inevitably the news media and the political chattering class, of which I count myself as a card-carrying member, has focused on the party politics of impeachment. With the benefit of hindsight, impeaching President Clinton was a disaster for the Republicans. Mr. Clinton’s job approval was at a record 73 percent the month he was impeached, Democrat’s defied the odds and picked up seats in the midterm elections and Mr. Gingrich returned to the private sector.

Impeaching Bill Clinton was wholly a political decision; the substance mattered little in 1998. Two decades later, Democrats face almost the exact opposite dynamics.

For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation. Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party.

Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century. Free trade abandoned for protectionism. Challenging our adversaries and promoting democracy replaced by coddling Russia and cozying up to dictators near and far. Fiscal conservatism replaced by reckless spending and exploding deficits.

What’s left of the party is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government.

Republicans today are the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson — a coalition that, in the face of every demographic trend in America, will mean the long-term realignment of the federal government behind the Democrats.

We’re not quite there yet — but keeping President Trump in office is the best way to cement Trumpism’s hold on the Republican Party.

Republicans themselves know it, and that simple fact is a huge problem for them: By and large they don’t like him, and they know he’s a long-term problem for the party — but in the short term they know they can’t get re-elected without his voters. For Democrats, it’s the dream scenario — as long as he completes his term.

President Trump should be impeached because he is unfit for the presidency. He represents a clear and present danger to our national security. We didn’t need Robert Mueller’s report for that. But if Newt Gingrich taught us anything, impeaching the president is likely to be bad politics.

Nothing will unite an increasingly fraying Republican Party more than trying to remove the president anywhere but at the ballot box. Democrats risk the kind of overreach that doomed the Republicans 20 years ago. And in any case Democrats are not likely to succeed in getting votes in the Senate to convict the president. And in politics, a loss is a loss — there are no moral victories.

I fully understand the historical imperative of holding the president accountable for his behavior. I also share the sentiment of so many Americans who want to punish him for what he’s done to the country. But I believe there is something bigger at stake.

Allowing Mr. Trump to lead the Republican Party, filled with sycophants and weak-willed leaders, into the next election is the greater prize. Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to realign American politics along progressive lines, very much like Ronald Reagan did for Republicans in the 1980s.

Trumpism equals Republicanism as long as Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket. And a real shift to progressivism in America will be delivered by a devastating rebuke of the president and his party, a rebuke that will return control of the Senate and state houses across the nation. Politics is always a gamble — and this is the best bet we’ve had in a long time.

From There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment by Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000:
I'm down with this plan.

By Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic

Here is, as William Barr might call it, “the bottom line”: The Mueller report describes, in excruciating detail and with relatively few redactions, a candidate and a campaign aware of the existence of a plot by a hostile foreign government to criminally interfere in the U.S. election for the purpose of supporting that candidate’s side. It describes a candidate and a campaign who welcomed the efforts and delighted in the assistance. It describes a candidate and a campaign who brazenly and serially lied to the American people about the existence of the foreign conspiracy and their contacts with it. And yet, it does not find evidence to support a charge of criminal conspiracy, which requires not just a shared purpose but a meeting of the minds.

Here is the other bottom line: The Mueller report describes a president who, on numerous occasions, engaged in conduct calculated to hinder a federal investigation. It finds ample evidence that at least a portion of that conduct met all of the statutory elements of criminal obstruction of justice. In some of the instances in which all of the statutory elements of obstruction are met, the report finds no persuasive constitutional or factual defenses. And yet, it declines to render a judgment on whether the president has committed a crime.

Now, the House must decide what to do with these facts. If it wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry.

....foreign intelligence services, and even many hostile non-state actors, are well aware nowadays of the advanced signals intelligence capabilities wielded by American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies which can lead to the exposure of any contacts using digital means. Non-digital means of communications using the true and tried methods described in the preceding examples, such as face-to-face private meetings in secure or non-suspicious locations, would have been readily available to the two sides if such collusion had occurred. Furthermore, given the methods already known to have been used by the Russian government as part of this electoral intervention, if collusion had occurred it would have required only a handful of such face-to-face meetings. Likewise, in an age where anyone interested in diligently covering their tracks can get access to strong encrypted communications with a smartphone app, it may be harder than ever to find any such direct digital communications if used. As a result, it would be very hard to find direct communications linking anyone associated with the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence...

....Mueller’s chances of finding the sort of clear, unambiguous evidence for collusion that would persuade a jury or two-thirds of the Senate are low. His team would have to identify, out of dozens of possible suspects, the specific associates within the Trump campaign who were aware of or involved in colluding with Russia.Then, if a possible suspect were located, Mueller’s team would need to find a way to overcome the heavy social and reputational costs that that suspect may fear more than serving significant time in prison. Alternatively, Mueller would have to find evidence of a handful of private meetings with few participants, which were conducted with people who have advanced professional training in hiding their tracks and avoiding surveillance. Likewise, given the possible non-digital nature of such contacts, Mueller’s team would have to do this without a critical investigatory tool: advanced U.S. signals intelligence and cyber-warfare capabilities.

Mueller had little chance of finding enough evidence of cooperation to prosecute. The smoke, though, was thick.

I wonder how much the approval rating really matters in the case of Trump.

I think his base still loves him, and they believe all the lies he and Barr spewed regarding the findings in the Mueller report.

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.

Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?

But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

Because the modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that’s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans may not think of it in those terms, but that’s what their behavior amounts to.

This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

Our country is facing lots of problems, and while Trump may be exacerbating many of them, he's not the only one. While I would love to see him booted out of office, it's very clear that that's not going to happen.

There's so much work that Congress needs to do, do we really want them to waste time on a quixotic activity like impeachment? As long as Republicans control the Senate, it won't get rid of Trump. It will just be for show, like all the votes to repeal Obamacare that were taken by the Republican HoR during Obama's term.

I do expect Congress to investigate further, to nail down all the details. But going through the full impeachment process could divide the nation even more than we already are. And for what end? It will probably just reinforce the opinions most people already has, not change many minds.

WASHINGTON — As Speaker Nancy Pelosi urges caution on impeachment, rank-and-file House Democrats are agonizing over the prospect of trying to oust President Trump, caught between their sense of historic responsibilities and political considerations in the wake of the special counsel’s damning portrait of abuses.

The Democrats — including more than 50 freshmen — are mindful that impeachment poses political risks that could endanger the seats of moderates and their majority, as well as strengthen Mr. Trump’s hand. But some prominent members of the 55-member strong Congressional Black Caucus and a newly empowered progressive caucus are pressing for action — three Democrats have filed articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump and dozens of others have signaled a willingness to consider that path.

“A realization is setting in that this moment has found us,” said Representative Jared Huffman, a fourth-term Democrat from Northern California, who is advocating for impeachment. “We cannot ignore it. We cannot wish it away. For some, this may be a very, very difficult matter. But this is why we have a House of Representatives. And this is absolutely what our founders imagined when a president did these sorts of things.”

Lawmakers of color, such as Representatives Maxine Waters of California, Al Green of Texas, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, seem to be leaning in the farthest. Ms. Tlaib had a pointed message for those who want to leave the decision to voters, or worry that impeachment would diminish their electoral prospects.

“I think the voters decided in the last election,” she said, noting the record turnout in her district and across the nation in 2018, especially among minorities. “They spoke and they elected not only the most diverse but the most bold freshman class that we have seen in a long time — people who are bold enough to hold this president accountable and not make decisions based on politics, but on putting country first.”

“I don’t ever want to look back — and I think a lot of my colleagues feel the same way — to say that we didn’t do everything in our power to stop this lawless president from jeopardizing our democracy,” she added.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, who fiercely defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, said the offenses laid out in the first volume of the report on Russian interference in the 2016 election are more worrisome than past “special counsels, prosecutors, independent investigations among Republican and Democratic presidents” have uncovered.

“I don’t think any member of Congress has ever seen this behavior before by any president of the United States of America,” she said, although she backed Ms. Pelosi’s go-slow approach. She continued, “Certainly, Volume I, which dictates and provides evidence of the seemingly rampant and continuous interaction between campaign operatives and the Trump administration with the adversary, is stunning.”

But just as liberals are invoking the founding fathers to press for impeachment, more moderate Democrats, whose districts will likely control who is in the majority after next year’s elections, are doing the same to urge caution.

“I believe, ultimately, what the founders created for us in our democracy is clear: When you disagree with someone’s approach or believe he or she is abusing the Constitution, you vote them out,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, a centrist Democrat from New Jersey. “You could impeach them, if it merits it, or you can beat them with better ideas and a better approach.”

The founders left the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors — the criteria for impeachment, along with more specific offenses like treason and bribery — open to interpretation. And the report from Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, did not provide clear guidance.

“The challenge is that the Mueller investigation did a data dump onto the American public and Congress, and the data dump suggests obstruction of justice, which would satisfy the requirement of high crimes and misdemeanors,” said Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian and an author of the recent book, “Impeachment: An American History.” “But the prosecutors didn’t say it, and the Justice Department isn’t saying it. And so it’s up to Congress to decide.”

Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania, has been thrown back to her days as a teenager watching the Watergate hearings and the resignation of Nixon unfold. She said she wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about the Mueller report.

“Often you go into these kinds of events with some impostor syndrome: What am I doing here? How did I get here?” she said. “All of a sudden I’m talking with my colleagues about what does this mean for the country and how do we go forward?”

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional law professor, has a well-marked copy of the Federalist Papers on his nightstand.

“The media just wants a thumbs up or thumbs down, pro-impeachment or not,” Mr. Raskin said. “They don’t appreciate this is a process, an instrument in the Constitution that is the people’s last defense against a president trampling the rule of law and acting like a king. But it is a process, and it is meant to be a process.”

Mr. Raskin said he believes that the obstruction outlined in Mr. Mueller’s report constitutes impeachable offenses, but he is not yet convinced they warrant proceeding with an impeachment. He urged Democrats to build an independent and full record for the public of what had occurred, rather than relying entirely on the Mueller report as Republicans relied on the Starr Report to impeach Mr. Clinton.

Removing a president from office requires bipartisan buy-in and the acceptance of the American people, as was the case with Richard M. Nixon but not Mr. Clinton. Congress undertook months of hearings on Watergate, beginning in May 1973, before threatening Nixon with impeachment in the summer of 1974. By that time, about two thirds of the American people believed he had participated in the Watergate cover-up.

“If you look at history, articles of impeachment were considered in the House of Representatives two weeks before Richard Nixon resigned; all the rest happened before that,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat from a safe seat in Illinois. “By the time that decision was made to go to articles of impeachment, the American people had heard it all and were persuaded.”

Ms. Pelosi and her leadership team appear to be following the Nixon model. The House Judiciary Committee has already issued a subpoena to compel the Justice Department to produce an unredacted copy of the Mueller report and all the evidence his investigation collected so Congress can begin sifting through it.

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, its chairman, has invited Attorney General William P. Barr to testify next week, then Mr. Mueller not long after, and also issued a subpoena for testimony from Donald F. McGahn II, a former White House counsel and a key witness in the special counsel’s obstruction investigation, later in May. He has promised to call others to air key facts out in the open to build a congressional record of possible obstruction of justice, abuses of power and corruption in the White House.

“We have not yet had our Sam Ervin moment,” Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, one of the longest-serving members of the Judiciary Committee and a member of its staff in the 1970s, said on Tuesday, referring to the North Carolina senator who led public hearings on Watergate. “We have not yet had public examination of the facts involved in this whole matter.”

That sits well with newer Democrats in tougher districts. At a town-hall meeting outside of Minneapolis on Tuesday night, freshman Representative Angie Craig was pressed by a pro-impeachment constituent. But her seat was Republican last year, and she demurred.

“I believe the next step is for Congress to request the unredacted version of the report, for the committee chairmen to call a number of folks forward and for those folks to fill in the facts for the American people,” she said, even as she declared herself “very troubled by a number of the potential areas of obstruction that are mentioned in the report.”

Bedeviling pro-impeachment Democrats are not other Democrats but a united Republican Party that is not even acknowledging the abuses outlined by the special counsel. And the White House has made clear that it does not intend to cooperate with requests for witnesses and documents — potentially cutting off options for the Democrats.

For now, even those agitating for a vote to open a formal impeachment inquiry appear to be content with the plan laid out by Ms. Pelosi and her leadership team to use the Mueller report as a road map for further investigation. Mr. Huffman called it tantamount to an impeachment inquiry, if not so in name.

Democrats are also mindful that voters sent them to Washington to address kitchen-table concerns — the high cost of health care, jobs, the ravages of the opioid epidemic — and worry about the implications of getting distracted from that agenda.

“Impeachment is designed as an extraordinary constitutional remedy, and it puts members of Congress in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Raskin said. “The Constitution obligates us to measure the importance of an impeachment investigation against everything else on the public agenda.”

Mr. Huffman and Ms. Waters have urged colleagues to grapple with the implications of failing to act: What if they choose not to try to impeach a president who had been all but accused by the special counsel of obstructing justice and is an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal campaign finance felony in New York?

“If that president cannot face impeachment, then part of our constitutional responsibility is just a bunch of dead words,” Mr. Huffman said. “I think that is pretty bad for the country. I think it invites abuse from this president for the next year and a half. I think it sets a terrible precedent that will be abused by future president. And we can’t take that lightly.”

He dismissed arguments from fellow Democrats that anticipated political outcomes should dictate their decision-making as “absurd self-serving readings of the tea leaves by folks who frankly don’t want to step up and make difficult decisions.”

Our country is facing lots of problems, and while Trump may be exacerbating many of them, he's not the only one. While I would love to see him booted out of office, it's very clear that that's not going to happen.

There's so much work that Congress needs to do, do we really want them to waste time on a quixotic activity like impeachment? As long as Republicans control the Senate, it won't get rid of Trump. It will just be for show, like all the votes to repeal Obamacare that were taken by the Republican HoR during Obama's term.

I do expect Congress to investigate further, to nail down all the details. But going through the full impeachment process could divide the nation even more than we already are. And for what end? It will probably just reinforce the opinions most people already has, not change many minds.

President Donald Trump said he’d ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene if Congress mounts an impeachment effort against him — even though there are no legal grounds for the justices to consider such a request.

"There no ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ there are no Crimes by me at all," he asserted in a subsequent Twitter posting.

Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people.

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systemic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Obviously, this is personal for me, and some may say that I’m not the right messenger. But my perspective is not just that of a former candidate and target of the Russian plot. I am also a former senator and secretary of state who served during much of Vladi­mir Putin’s ascent, sat across the table from him and knows firsthand that he seeks to weaken our country.

I am also someone who, by a strange twist of fate, was a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974, as well as first lady during the impeachment process that began in 1998. And I was a senator for New York after 9/11, when Congress had to respond to an attack on our country. Each of these experiences offers important lessons for how we should proceed today.

First, like any time our nation is threatened, we have to remember that this is bigger than politics. What our country needs now is clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive partisanship. Whether they like it or not, Republicans in Congress share the constitutional responsibility to protect the country. Mueller’s report leaves many unanswered questions — in part because of Attorney General William P. Barr’s redactions and obfuscations. But it is a road map. It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map leads — to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and fearless.

The president tried to manipulate the justice system. Congress must not let this go, argues the Editorial Board. (The Washington Post)

Second, Congress should hold substantive hearings that build on the Mueller report and fill in its gaps, not jump straight to an up-or-down vote on impeachment. In 1998, the Republican-led House rushed to judgment. That was a mistake then and would be a mistake now.

Watergate offers a better precedent. Then, as now, there was an investigation that found evidence of corruption and a coverup. It was complemented by public hearings conducted by a Senate select committee, which insisted that executive privilege could not be used to shield criminal conduct and compelled White House aides to testify. The televised hearings added to the factual record and, crucially, helped the public understand the facts in a way that no dense legal report could. Similar hearings with Mueller, former White House counsel Donald McGahn and other key witnesses could do the same today.

During Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee also began a formal impeachment inquiry that was led by John Doar, a widely respected former Justice Department official and hero of the civil rights struggle. He was determined to run a process that the public and history would judge as fair and thorough, no matter the outcome. If today’s House proceeds to an impeachment inquiry, I hope it will find someone as distinguished and principled as Doar to lead it.

Third, Congress can’t forget that the issue today is not just the president’s possible obstruction of justice — it’s our national security. After 9/11, Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks. We need a similar commission today to help protect our elections. This is necessary because the president of the United States has proved himself unwilling to defend our nation from a clear and present danger. It was just reported that Trump’s recently departed secretary of homeland security tried to prioritize election security because of concerns about continued interference in 2020 and was told by the acting White House chief of staff not to bring it up in front of the president. This is the latest example of an administration that refuses to take even the most minimal, common-sense steps to prevent future attacks and counter ongoing threats to our nation.

Fourth, while House Democrats pursue these efforts, they also should stay focused on the sensible agenda that voters demanded in the midterms, from protecting health care to investing in infrastructure. During Watergate, Congress passed major legislation such as the War Powers Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973. For today’s Democrats, it’s not only possible to move forward on multiple fronts at the same time, it’s essential. The House has already passed sweeping reforms that would strengthen voting rights and crack down on corruption, and now is the time for Democrats to keep their foot on the gas and put pressure on the do-nothing Senate. It’s critical to remind the American people that Democrats are in the solutions business and can walk and chew gum at the same time.

We have to get this right. The Mueller report isn’t just a reckoning about our recent history; it’s a warning about the future. Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in 2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well. This is an urgent threat. Nobody but Americans should be able to decide America’s future. And, unless he’s held accountable, the president may show even more disregard for the laws of the land and the obligations of his office. He will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.

Of all the lessons from our history, the one that’s most important may be that each of us has a vital role to play as citizens. A crime was committed against all Americans, and all Americans should demand action and accountability. Our founders envisioned the danger we face today and designed a system to meet it. Now it’s up to us to prove the wisdom of our Constitution, the resilience of our democracy and the strength of our nation.

The biggest ignoramus president in history?

Trump Erroneously Claims U.S. Supreme Court Role in Impeachmentwhatsoever.

Everyone is ridiculing this statement, but doesn't the Supreme Court have ultimate authority through their role in interpreting the Constitution? Who rules on whether a particular activity constitutes "high crimes or misdemeanors"?

Everyone is ridiculing this statement, but doesn't the Supreme Court have ultimate authority through their role in interpreting the Constitution? Who rules on whether a particular activity constitutes "high crimes or misdemeanors"?

SCOTUS decided the presidential election in Bush v. Gore.