Swanson -- Can Trump Bring Impeachment Back from the Dead?
Can Trump Bring Impeachment Back from the Dead?
Can the man who’s brought back measles, fascism, and royal ballrooms raise impeachment from the grave? No, of course not. He can hardly raise himself from a chair. But with his help, the rest of us might be able to do it.
When the House Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment against Nixon, it carefully avoided the central issue of the war, but it did not limit itself to sex scandals, or offenses no Congress Member could commit, or partisan positions that only members of one party would support. It aimed more for bland technicalities: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, contempt of Congress. Nowadays, such things go on your CV when applying for a government job, but in 1973 it was understood that members of both parties in the House and Senate were likely to impeach and convict, so Nixon split before that could happen.
Each president who followed Nixon went on committing blatantly impeachable offenses, and often a small number of Congress members introduced articles, but little came of it, until the man who destroyed the promised peace dividend, welfare as we knew it, fair media, fair trade, banking regulations, and any hope of single-payer healthcare came along. As with any other president, strong articles of impeachment could have been passed against Bill Clinton. Instead the focus — while still using obstruction of justice and perjury, the sort of charges that many other investigations could have produced — was placed on sex scandal.
We’ve had a severe shortage of presidential sex scandals ever since. So, I’m not saying nothing was accomplished. But I am saying that if Clinton had been impeached for his wars we might have had fewer wars ever since. Of course we’ve had fewer sex scandals in part because we’ve not learned any secrets related to sex about most presidents and because Trump’s status as a known harasser and sexual assailant has been treated as generally acceptable. So, what’s been accomplished is far from all positive.
When Bush the Lesser was in office, something new and different — I mean something good — happened with impeachment. The public demanded it. And some Congress Members at least pretended to listen. Democrats, like Congressman John Conyers, wrote up reports and published books and gave speeches about impeaching Bush, and for very serious abuses of power. All the public had to do was vote the Democrats into the majority in 2006, and Congress would end the wars, impeach the president, and set things right. The public listened and did just as it had been advised. Then the Democrats escalated the war on Iraq and held — I am not making this up — pretend impeachment hearings with an announcement at the start that nobody would get impeached.
Impeachment was now becoming a trick, a bait-and-switch pretense, and an almost purely partisan one at that — something for more energetic candidates to talk about during eternal election campaigns, while the more boring ones prattled on about Supreme Court nominations or the superficial scandals of the opposing team.
When Democrats chose war, a ban on impeachment, looking forward, and Barack Obama over holding Dubya to account, many of us warned what would come — not just treating the blood-soaked nitwit as an admired elder portrait painter, but empowering mafialike conduct from the governments to follow. It wasn’t a wild guess. With Obama and Trump and Biden and Trump we got encyclopedia-length lists of impeachable offenses. We got routine murders by missile. We got unending wars. We got secrecy glorified and civil liberties crushed. We got genocides armed and cheered for. We got peace agreements prevented. We got the Cold War back with arms races, nuclear threats, xenophobia, and cops kicking in doors, but with virtually nobody believing that Congress could be made to put a halt to it.
With Obama in the White House, Republicans were not going to impeach him for covering up, excusing, continuing, and escalating his predecessor’s crimes. Democrats were too busy licking his boots. And many ordinary people acted as though they needed to give him the benefit of the doubt for his first seven years or so, as anything else would have been racist.
With Trump 1.0, many demanded his impeachment from day 1 and documented long lists of offenses. But in Congress, Republicans were clearly not going to put the law or the public ahead of their party leader. And Democrats were clearly going to limit themselves to strange topics. They ended up going with an obscure and hard to prove, but very pro-war charge related to Ukraine that seemed more of a campaign commercial for Democrats and wars than a serious effort to rein in abuse of power. Then, following Trump’s attempted coup in January 2021, as he was on his way out the door anyway, Congress impeached him a second time. He’d been inciting violence since his first election campaign and had supported coups around the world, so this seemed like too little too late. It also looked partisan, because all but 10 Republicans shamefully voted against impeachment and all but seven against conviction.
If only we had people who put something above party, or a sex scandal that Congress Members objected to.
With Biden in office, some Republicans pulled a Conyers. They promised to impeach in 2023 if given a majority in the House in 2022. They were given it. But they dragged out the process for two years without impeaching.
Now we’re in 2026 with eerie echoes of 2006 bouncing around the marble walls of the legislative asylum. Congressman Jamie Raskin has been cast in the role of John Conyers. But there are differences. Raskin went hard for Russiagate and war in Ukraine, so his interests are not strictly antiwar. But he is reportedly listing the war on Iran as the top offense (not its violation of numerous treaties or its murderous horror or the lies told to justify it, but the fact that Congress hasn’t “authorized” it). The Epstein Files is looming everywhere as a potential way to get impeachment back to the once-crucial topic of sex. But Raskin doesn’t mention that. Instead he mentions charges for which the evidence is all publicly available. In many ways, that seems like a positive development.
“There are certainly more than a dozen impeachable offenses,” Raskin told HuffPost. “He pointed to Trump launching a war without congressional authorization, usurping lawmakers’ power to direct federal spending, improperly laying taxes on foreign goods, vindictively directing prosecutions against his political enemies, and inappropriately profiting off the crypto industry while pardoning convicted fraudsters. Trump, who is now fully consumed with building his legacy, has repeatedly talked about getting impeached if Republicans lose the midterms.”
In the role of Nancy Pelosi is Hakeem Jeffries who recently published a goofy video in which he tried to reassure his constituents that, even though he likes wars, opposes heathcare, and holds secret meetings with members of Trump’s family, he’s really a great guy. In the video, Jeffries uses the word “accountable” very often, but the word “impeach” never.
True to his Conyers impersonation, Raskin catches the drift. “We have to identify where, exactly, impeachment and trial and conviction fit into the complete legislative and policy agenda of the country,” Raskin said. “Maybe it’s the number one most important thing, or maybe it’s the eighth most important thing, or maybe we don’t know yet, and that’s why I say impeachment is not a fetish with us.”
Once the choice has become one between not doing something and making that something a fetish, that thing ain’t happening — unless people demand it and force it to happen, unless people reject the media pretenses that Congress can’t walk and chew gum simultaneously, unless we the people understand and act on the understanding that being able to control a lawless government is key to being able to compel that government to act on whichever priority is being held forth as the thing that must be worked on instead of impeachment.
The fact is that two-thirds of the country does not “approve” of Trump in polls. It takes two-thirds of the Senate to convict an impeached official. What does it take to compel senators to represent their constituents? That is what remains to be determined.
https://davidswanson.org/can-trump-bring-impeachment-back-from-the-dead/
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