Impeachment Reloaded

Back in the spring I wrote a longish post about where I stood on the whole issue of if the House should impeach Trump. I made a number of arguments about why I thought proceeding with impeachment then based on "Russiagate" stuff would have few upsides and many potential downsides. As I put it then, " I'm fairly confident of this: impeaching Trump without hope of conviction by the Senate and removal from office is a bad idea basically all around."

So how do I think this piece holds up now that we are seeing Trump ask foreign governments to go after his political rivals? Well at the risk of appearing to want to have my cake and eat it too I'd argue that my position made sense then, but things seem to really have changed over the last two weeks. In other words while I still think my skepticism of impeachment back then made sense, it's hard for me to not see it as necessary or even inevitable now.

I won't go over all my old points, but I do think things really have changed. The thing to remember here is impeachment is a political not legal process. That is to say rather than being about questions of law, whether it will make sense or work is really based on if the politics of it will work. And it seems to me that the politics of impeachment are now working.

To begin with, it appears that we are seeing real movement on the popularity of impeachment with 538's new cool tracker showing the public moving for a fairly substantial 10 plus point opposition to impeachment, to a new slight plurality of support after the Ukraine bombshell hit. To be fair this is hardly a giant shift, but it is real and shows that Ukraine revelations seemed to have really changed the game. 

Likewise we've seen a major shift in how many GOP party actors are responding to this new crisis  (and Trump's subsequent King Charles I style behavior) compared to their response to previous Trump created crises. Back when the Mueller Report came out, most GOP party actors took to defending Trump and toting the White's House's line that it was a witch hunt, or a "nothing burger" etc.

But recently we are seeing something quite different with two Republican governors expressing support for impeachment proceedings. Likewise we've seen a number of statements from prominent senators that, while aren't the same a backing impeachment, are a far cry from past support for the Trump Administration. And other Senators just refuse to say anything.  

This is a pretty big deal. Oftentimes we like to think of political opposition or support for something as being binary, where you're either for or against it. But in politics support is largely a variable with a whole spectrum of support or opposition to a given action or position. Think of a campaign endorsement, if someone agrees to endorse your campaign it could mean a number of different thing from just saying "Okay you can put my name on your website" on one end of the spectrum to "I can wait to start campaigning for you and helping you fundraise!" on the other end.

The same sort of dynamic is going on with Republicans and impeachment. One one end of the spectrum Republican politicians can just go with "Fake news!" or trot out the White House's latest talking points, while on the other end they could call for Trump to resign. Just saying nothing, that is refusing to defend the president in public, thus is actually not good at all for Trump and somewhere in the middle.

Finally, I'd argue that a major different between Ukraine stuff and Russia stuff (we really need to find better terminology for these things) is that for better or for worse the American public are big believers in the philosophy of "look forward, not back." And that reality is a big part about why the reactions to Russia appear quite different the recent reactions to Ukraine. The Russia stuff was largy about Trump's misconduct in the past and tied up in people's complex feelings about the 2016 elections.

But the Ukraine scandal is quite different as it's about current and ongoing misconduct by the president, not past events. Likewise it's fundamentally about the future election of 2020, and if Trump will use his position as POTUS to try to unduly influence the elction via his powers of office and the nation's foreign policy, rather than about relitigating 2016. 

Oh yeah that and the story of Trump and Russia is a pretty epic saga, while Ukrainegate is based on simple, uncontested facts. The American public is not big on dense, complicated stories.

At this point I'm not going to make a prediction about if Trump will be impeached and if so if he'll be removed from office. But that outcomes now seems at least possible, which means the Democrats' political calculus should change quite a bit from where it was back in the spring. In other words, since this a political process the fact that the politics of it now seem to work means the Democrats moving forward makes a lot of sense.