Impeachment is a journey into the political unknown

My new commentary in the Business Times

Impeachment is a journey into the political unknown

Despite this, leaders sometimes need to move beyond making political cost-benefit calculations and hope that the people will eventually join them in the pursuit of protecting their principles

TUE, OCT 01, 2019 - 5:50 AM

LEON HADAR

"Don't start a war you know you're going to lose," advised the fictional American President Frank Underwood (played by actor Kevin Spacey) in the HBO television series, House of Cards. To which one could respond: "And what do you do if you are not sure if you're going to win or lose?"

And if you think that these dilemmas make life complicated for the potential warrior, consider what German general and military theorist Erwin Rommel had to say : "Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning."

As the Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, are launching impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, they are in fact declaring war against the White House occupant, which they are not sure if they would win. They are not even certain whether if they did succeed in impeaching their political nemesis, they would be in a position to declare victory - or perhaps admit defeat.

Underscoring the political and constitutional quandaries that the Democrats will be finding themselves in would be lessons from the three previous attempts by Congress to take on a sitting president and try to impeach him. In two cases, they got him - but then not only did they not gain a lot from their victories, they found themselves on the defensive.

Voting on articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives can be compared to the charges against defendants brought up by the prosecutor before a court of law. At the end of the trial, the accused can still be acquitted by a judge or jury.

Similarly, in order to oust a sitting president from power and perhaps send him to jail, two-thirds of the US Senators need to follow the impeachment in the House with a conviction.

That did not happen in 1868 following the impeachment in the House of President Andrew Johnson, nor after charges were brought against President Bill Clinton in 1998. In both cases, the Senate ended up acquitting the impeached presidents.

In fact, in the more recent case of President Clinton - who was charged of lying under oath about his affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky - the impeachment process backfired politically against the Republicans who initiated it.

Hence according to a 1999 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 57 per cent of Americans approved of the Senate's decision to keep President Clinton in office and two-thirds of those polled said the impeachment was harmful to the country.

And while President Clinton's job approval rating rose in the aftermath of the so-called Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the driving force behind the impeachment push, was officially reprimanded by the House for an ethics violation and the Republicans ended up losing their control of the legislative chamber. So who needs losses with "victories" like this?

Then there was the resignation of Republican President Richard Nixon who had faced allegations of abuse of power during what came to be known as the Watergate Scandal.

While the House and the Senate did investigate the charges against President Nixon, the House never moved to vote to impeach the then-president. Instead, the president decided to resign in August 1974 after his Republican allies told him that he faced certain impeachment in the House and that he had, at most, only 15 votes in his favour in the Senate, far fewer than the 34 needed to avoid removal from office.

This demonstrates that an effort to impeach a president amounts to a journey into the political unknown, and explains why the 79-year-old Speaker Pelosi (who was around during the last two attempts to do that) has been resisting pressure from her Democratic colleagues in the last three years to go ahead and impeach President Trump over his alleged collusion with Russia.

The cautious Speaker has opposed such a move even after her party retook control of the House in 2018, which meant that the Democrats could probably muster enough votes in that legislative chamber to impeach Mr Trump, in the same way that the Republican-controlled House had brought the articles of impeachment against President Clinton in 1998. And we now know how that ended.

More specifically, it has been clear that with the Republicans controlling the Senate, it would take at least 20 Republicans to convict Mr Trump and remove him from office. And until recently at least, that seemed to be an unlikely scenario.

Moreover, public opinion polls have indicated that the majority of Americans, including Independents, were opposed to launching full-blown impeachment proceedings against their president.

These public sentiments reflect concerns that months of more congressional investigations of President Trump, especially after he seemed to emerge legally unhurt from the so-called "Russiagate", would divert attention from important issues like health care and education, and would basically paralyse the legislative and policy processes in Washington.

And then there is this: The American people, including those who detest the current president, are not looking forward to watching their commander-in-chief being forced out of office and treated like a criminal. They prefer to trust the outcome of an election.

Hence Speaker Pelosi seemed to be reflecting the public mood when she insisted that the Democrats' goal should be to beat Mr Trump fair and square in next year's election. She argued that voters would punish the Democrats for taking the road towards impeachment and that President Trump would benefit from that by depicting himself as a victim of a lynch mob and by rallying his electoral base.

So what has led Speaker Pelosi to change her mind now to give a green light to drawing the impeachment articles, and to entangle Washington into a major constitutional crisis that could backfire against the Democrats? She could end up a political loser - not unlike Republican House Speaker Mr Gingrich following President Clinton's impeachment.

Perhaps the Democratic leader senses that when President Trump decided to press his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to do him a "favour" and investigate former vice- president Joe Biden and his son - in effect asking that a foreign power interfere in American domestic politics - he has crossed sacred constitutional lines, and that the American people, including some Republicans, would finally recognise that.

Indeed, sometimes leaders need to move beyond making political cost-benefit calculations and decide to protect their cherished principles - which in this case comes down to safeguarding the US Constitution - and hope that the people would eventually join them in the pursuit of that goal.

At this stage, it does seem that while more Americans are now supporting impeaching the president, the country remains divided over the issue, and there are no indications that Republicans in the Senate are ready to abandon the president.

But constitutional and political crises tend to produce momentum of their own, and public opinion could change in response to new revelations and congressional testimonies.

That happened during the Watergate scandal, when on the eve of the impeachment hearings, the majority of Americans were opposed to the idea of President Nixon being ousted from office. Yet after the president resigned, a large majority of the American public supported the move - which demonstrates that no one knows how this journey will end.