In the Future, Every President Will Be Impeached
We have entered the Late Republic.
Only two of our 45 Presidents have been impeached, and neither of them were removed from office. In both cases, the crimes involved were relatively minor: removing a man from the Cabinet in violation of existing law, and lying under oath about an affair. In both cases, the presidents were dealing with a hostile Congress who disliked them on a visceral level. But the difference between the two was striking:
Andrew Johnson was a lifelong Democrat, a means of appealing to Southerners and Democrats as a part of Lincoln’s National Union ticket. He was catapulted to the presidency by Lincoln’s assassination at the end of the Civil War. The years 1865–1869 were a harrowing and difficult time, in which tempers were raw and crisis had followed crisis for so long no one remembered anything else. In short, it should not surprise that a southerner and Democrat was unable to command respect in Congress as Abraham Lincoln’s corpse was returned to Illinois. The greater surprise is that he escaped conviction.
In Bill Clinton’s case, no immediate or recent crisis justified the rancor. Clinton was a popular, center-left president presiding over a strong economy. He should have been bulletproof. But instead, an ongoing investigation into his personal life (i.e., being sued for sexual harassment), led to the unearthing of his White House peccadilloes, and the cover-up provided the justification for what Republicans had been wanting to do to this man from the beginning: Get rid of him.
For Republicans of the 1990’s, Clinton was a figure of visceral, almost inchoate dislike: a forked-tongue hillbilly glad-handler with a smarmy grin who somehow always escaped consequences for his actions, a man whose numerous extramarital affairs and accusations of sexual assault were protected, almost celebrated, by his party and the mainstream culture-makers. Clinton was the Man from Hope before Obama personified it.
In other words, the refusal to accept this man’s legitimacy, the hunger to Get the Bastard, led to hunting for a pretext, any pretext, that would serve to send him away. The two major political parties have been seeking to destroy each other’s legitimacy for a long time.
The shadow of Richard Nixon looms larger and larger as time goes by. Scarcely a presidential administration has gone by since his without the hunger to reproduce his scandal and visit his downfall on his successors. He remains the great exception to the statement that no President has been removed from office. Impeachment articles had been drafted, and in a Democratic Senate, Nixon’s aides estimated he had as few as 15 votes in his favor. The writing was on the wall. Impeachment and removal from office were treated by all as givens.
Nor should the seriousness of the charges against him be doubted. Felony burglarly charges against white house aides, a domestic spying campaign against political opponents, these are not nothing. They cut right to the heart of the question of the American Head of State being bound by the law he is charged with enforcing. Almost no one was sad to see him go.
And yet, neither can the visceral, personal dislike of Nixon by his opponents and the culture-makers be ignored. Bill Clinton had nothing on Nixon as a a bete-noire, a figure of ridicule despite his abilities (and relative centrism on domestic matters), an embodiment of the Cold War who owed his 1968 election to Vietnam making Lyndon Johnson un-electable (Nixon is the only person nominated by the Republican party to the presidency a second time after losing an election). And while he may have merited his destruction, the joy his enemies experienced in destroying him has permanently warped our politics.
Every presidency since Nixon, barring the three one-termers (Ford, Carter and Bush, Sr.), has had an attempted Watergate. Reagan had Iran-Contra; Clinton had Lewinsky; Bush, Jr. had the Plame scandal. Whatever the merits of these, they each had their origin in the yearning to cast a President down, by whatever means necessary. None of them exactly rose to the level of Watergate.
Even Barack Obama, despite claims of a “scandal-free administration”, had attempts by Congressional Republicans to Watergate him. Both Operation Fast and Furious and the bloodshed at the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, were turned into Administration Scandals by Republicans. Nor were they without teeth: The Fast & Furious Scandal resulted in the first instance of a Cabinet Official (Attorney General Eric Holder) being held in contempt by Congress, and the Benghazi affair was one more log on the everlasting bonfire of Clinton Scandals.
While none of these scandals bloomed into impeachment, they all fed the noise machine, the hate machine. Politics has become about the party out of the White House seeking any means to utterly delegitimize the party in. This has simply become the norm.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, about whom no Democrat can comment sanely. The improbability of this man becoming President, combined with his profoundly un-genteel political persona, has transformed his enemies into sharks in a blood-red sea, snapping and writhing mindlessly. Trump belongs to that class of of politicians, like Nixon and Clinton, whose mere existence poisons the mind of the loyal opposition.
His entire presidency so far has borne investigation and naked attempts to de-legitimize. Even his election itself was chalked up to mysterious meetings and Russian bots rather than Hillary Clinton’s hubris in not campaigning in the Midwest. Despite a Special Prosecutor and months upon months of exercise, however, nothing came of this. The sensible thing is to rely upon the next election to unseat the President, but the Democrats seem unable to trust themselves to succeed at this. So now the President’s request of the Ukrainian President to investigate Biden’s dealings with the Ukraine is held up to be a monstrosity against with the Rape of Lucrece was but a trifle.
Will this stick? Who knows? But inasmuch as legal investigation is not burglary, and that Biden may well have done something to investigate, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that all the sound and fury will signify nothing, just as it did with RussiaGate. Enforcing the law is, after all, part of the President’s job. Yet even if this Watergating fails, the scandal-as-bloodsport mood in the capitol is not like to abate.
Notice something else: rather than cheerfully move on with business, Trump is retaliating against his accusers. He suspects illegality and shadiness just as rank and wretched in his enemies as they suspect in him. He does not want to be acquitted; he wants to kneecap the Democrats, and prosecute those who prosecute him.
Such a development is obvious to anyone who understands human behavior over time. When everyone is guilty of three felonies a day, and everyone lives under the national intelligence panopticon, then it’s not at all difficult to head your enemies off at the pass by moving on them first. So politics devolves into a competition between the two major parties of who gets in the first accusation of the biggest crime with the best evidence.
And as with Nixon begetting the longing for impeachment, Clinton and Trump will make IJB (Impeachment, Just Because) the norm. We are no longer content to let the political process slow presidents down. We have come to distrust the process. For the Left as well as for the Right, each President is a Caeser-in-waiting, and as with Caeser, we have determined to prosecute him before he destroys the Republic.
Eventually, one will cross the Rubicon.
