Why Impeachment Will Stay Partisan
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Why Impeachment Will Stay Partisan
The arc of events has been determined by Trump’s opponents, who refuse to recognize his legitimacy.
Nobody doubts a Democratic House can produce 218 votes for impeachment. It probably doesn’t matter much what the charges are. In some sense, that’s where impeachment should land: The charges matter less than whether, under the totality of considerations, a president should be removed before his term ends.
Democrats are still living down previous quotes about the need for a broadly supported impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, for one, likely regarded herself as handcuffed by the Ukraine whistleblower. If Mr. Trump were re-elected and she had failed to pursue impeachment, a freight train of blame would have come her way from her own caucus. Her chances of being re-elected speaker would be nil.
Here’s guessing this is how we really got today’s partisan impeachment. There is still a chance, of course, that the charges themselves could alter the equation, by shifting opinion in the body politic. Can the Ukraine charges do it? No and yes—but Democrats are pushing bad assumptions that voters would be advised to think twice about:
That Ukraine is our dear ally, in whose conflict with Russia we should become deeply engaged.
That politics stops at the water’s edge. (It never did.)
That the only relevant description of Joe Biden is “political opponent of Donald Trump” rather than “former high official whose actions should rightly be scrutinized.”
“Quid pro quo” has become this year’s “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” But it doesn’t follow. The Constitution and voters both give the president broad leeway to make foreign policy. For this reason, it is hard to delegitimize Mr. Trump because he doesn’t care as much about a given Ukrainian government’s struggles as some of his officials do, or that he puts a higher priority on eliciting Kyiv’s cooperation in investigations of a previous U.S. administration, or that he pursues these goals with his own agents outside normal (i.e., Trump-unfriendly) channels. Consider the lazy and oxymoronic conflation that you see everywhere accusing him of using foreign policy to advance his “personal political interests.” What president doesn’t?
Mr. Trump’s Ukraine actions are not illegal, and I doubt the sacredness of Ukraine policy matters to many Americans. But any reason is good enough if you believe an incompetent president should be removed for the sake of the country. Is Mr. Trump incompetent?
He is a gadfly president, out of sync with many of the policy emanations of his own administration. He plays his own game. There are as many ways to be president as there have been presidents. Is this an invalid model? It’s hard to say so when so many voters continue to claim he’s been the president they wanted. His actions have been extraordinarily consistent with his promises.
The question of presidential competence, of course, is a sticky one—Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, WMD, I could go on. By the results, Trumpism has not been half bad, whatever hysteria he provokes over symbolic issues like the Paris climate accord, or whatever the inflaming rhetoric he uses to advance his basically Obamaesque immigration and foreign-policies.
Democracy, let us remind ourselves, is not a system for finding the ablest leaders but a system for legitimizing outcomes, good, bad or indifferent. Which brings us to the real crux: Mr. Trump’s opponents rejected his legitimacy from the start, pushed fabricated allegations, spoke of impeaching him before he even took office.
Voters had a right to expect better from their elites—i.e., a more productive response. Mr. Trump was in no sense a Republican, a partisan, a conservative or a policy student. His gadfly presidency, under other circumstances, might be wrapping up now, with declarations of victory and possibly having done some good. But the arc of events has been determined by his opponents. They were not satisfied with opposing him. They sought to destroy him. Mr. Trump, it’s easy to see, believes he must stick around and continue to wrap himself in the immunities and powers of the presidency simply to defend himself and the legitimacy of his 2016 victory.
When history assesses blame, Hillary Clinton, and not Mr. Trump, will be the biggest sinner of our time. Mrs. Clinton continues to flog the claim, and increasingly wildly, targeting Greens and dissenting Democrats, that Russia controls our politics. Any day now, she can be expected to declare that Michael Bloomberg, now threatening to enter the Democratic presidential race, is another “Russian asset.”
In a few years, Mr. Trump’s passage through our national life will not seem so hysterically important as it does now, though an opportunity has been lost. Mrs. Clinton, whatever she may have achieved in life, deserves to be remembered finally as the coward who put the country second because she couldn’t accept the legitimacy of her defeat.
Rest - https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-imp...an-11573251982
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