The impeachment of President Trump is more about the future than it is about the present.
The present-day consequences aren’t trivial, to be sure. There will be a trial, which will no doubt deepen our national polarization. And henceforth, in the history books, Trump will go down as an impeached president — one of a precious few.
Or at least, a precious few for now. The count isn’t apt to stay small in coming decades.
There was only one impeachment, Andrew Johnson’s, in the first century of constitutional governance. There wasn’t another one for a century after that, with President Richard Nixon and Watergate. Knowing he would almost certainly be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate, Nixon spared the nation by resigning.
It was another quarter-century until President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and acquittal by the Senate. That was 20 years ago. But it won’t be two decades until the next one. Bank on it.
That is because Trump’s impeachment is the one the Framers feared. It is a straight-party-line impeachment, based on misconduct that is so nebulous and inconsequential that Democrats changed their theory of criminality multiple times (“quid pro quo,” campaign finance, extortion, bribery) until finally settling on no crime at all, accusing the president of “abuse of power.”
This new standard is so amorphous, it could be applied to any president. Every president, after all, abuses the awesome powers of the office from time to time, and the opposition party always cries, “Corruption!”
Now, no one will be satisfied with cries. The base of the party out of power will expect its representatives in Congress to impeach the president, particularly if they have the raw numbers to get it done in the House.
The Framers understood that a congressional impeachment power was “indispensable,” as James Madison put it. It was needed to discourage executive overreach and strip power if egregious instances of it demonstrated that the president was unfit.
Their fears about abuse of power, though, weren’t confined to the presidency. Their major worry was the accumulation of too much power in the hands of any organ of government. Impeachment might give the Congress too much power over the chief executive. It might invite partisans to impeach a president on trivial grounds, for sheer political advantage.
Because of those concerns, our government was designed to make impeachment difficult to carry out. The Framers adopted a standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in an effort to highlight that comparatively minor acts of misconduct and maladministration were insufficiently grave to trigger impeachment and all the upheaval that accompanies it.
More practically, they required a supermajority for conviction and removal, two-thirds of the Senate. This would mean that no president could be stripped of power absent misconduct so abominable that a public consensus for removal would form, such that two-thirds of senators would be moved to transcend ties of party, ideology and loyalty.
This supermajority requirement was to have a sobering effect on the House, too. Unless presidential malfeasance was sufficiently serious that there was a reasonable chance the Senate would vote to remove, the House would be dissuaded from impeaching in the first place. Members of Congress could expect to be punished at the ballot box for needlessly putting the country through a futile impeachment.
That’s gone now. There is a new kind of politics in America, one we will come to regret. The theory is that elections are won not by broadening a coalition, reaching out to attract or convincing opponents and undecideds. No, they are won by stoking grievance on one’s own side and electrifying one’s base — which is never more united and enthusiastic than when it opposes a political enemy.
So Democrats will impeach Trump, not because they believe they can remove him, but because they think branding him with the scarlet “I” is a promising 2020 campaign strategy.
If it can be done to Trump, it can be done to the next president and the next and the next. … And now, each party’s base will demand that it be done. If each side doesn’t impeach the enemy’s president, it will mean their partisans in the House aren’t trying hard enough.
Trump will survive. Electorally speaking, impeachment may even benefit him, if the public comes to see Democrats as having abused their impeachment power. But our country will be the worse for it.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant US attorney, is a contributing editor of National Review. Twitter: @AndrewCMcCarthy