Yesterday's impeachment vote: profiles in courage, cravenness, and incoherence

The eighty-five-day sprint to impeachment managed by Nancy Pelosi was the most amazingly swift and brilliantly orchestrated Congressional effort in modern history. Pelosi had been—smartly—resistant to impeachment, but when Trump released his transcript and thereby not only dared the Democrats to nail him but revealed that he was already trying to rig the 2020 election, she went at him like a heat-seeking missile. She made the savvy call to make Adam Schiff and not Gerry Nadler the impeachment manager. She oversaw the collection of a remarkable amount of utterly damning evidence and testimony in just a few weeks despite a total stonewalling by the White House, made sure that the White Supremacist Party failed in their effort to derail the hearings, rejected the notion of pressuring her caucus in regards to final roll call, and in the end lost only two votes. It’s impossible to exaggerate how difficult this whole process was to pull off or how masterfully Pelosi and the House Democrats executed it. Trumpists and so-called progressives who think that politics is an intellectual exercise and not something involving humans love to disparage Pelosi as a soulless creature of compromise, but what she is is the best American legislative politician since World War II. And she has totally gotten inside Trump’s head, too. We are damn fortunate to have her at this existential moment in American history. If you aren’t ready to give up the American experiment—for better and for worse—the Democrats are literally the only show in town.

Yesterday we saw politicians commit acts of real courage. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one House Democrats who represent districts that Trump carried in 2016 risked their political futures to vote to impeach Trump on both articles. This is something that should be celebrated and that should inspire all of us in these dark days.

These are yesterday’s Profiles in Courage: Tom O'Halleran (Ariz.), Lucy McBath (Ga.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Lauren Underwood (Ill.), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Haley Stevens (Mich.), Angie Craig (Minn.), Susie Lee (Nev.), Chris Pappas (N.H.), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Andy Kim (N.J.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.), Xochitl Torres Small (N.M.), Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.), Antonio Delgado (N.Y.), Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.), Max Rose (N.Y.), Kendra Horn (Okla.), Matt Cartwright (Pa.), Conor Lamb (Pa.), Joe Cunningham (S.C.), Ben McAdams (Utah), Elaine Luria (Va.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), Ron Kind (Wis.)

Jared Golden (Maine) voted for the first article of impeachment but against the second.

Conversely, yesterday will always be known for the White Supremacist Party’s full-throated, snarling rejection of the Constitution in favor of outright fascism. The televised hearings revealed in living color how the former Republican Party is now the party of white men, by white men, and for white men. (Only one African American remains in the House GOP caucus, and he is leaving.) The howling, nasty mob on the White Supremacist Party side of the aisle not only looks nothing like the real America, it wants no part of it. The Profiles in Cravenness Award (there was never any doubt) goes to the White Supremacist Party members in the House. If you dream of slitting the throat of Lady Liberty and permanently replacing her with a corrupt, vicious, misogynous, and utterly immoral tyrant with testicles that will never drop, this is your tribe.
           
We’re talking about politicians here, so not surprisingly we have one more award to dole out—the Profiles in Incoherence Award. The winner—by a long mile—is Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard claims to make ending regime-change wars the centerpiece of her Presidential campaign, which would be laudable where it not for the reality that Gabbard inhabits the most horrible piece of turf in American politics—that fever swamp out behind the political barn where the alt-right and alt-left meet to swap crudely simplistic conspiracy theories. Tulsi Gabbard has much more in common with Steve Bannon (he’s a fan) than she does with Bernie Sanders, and she has created a very Trumpian political brand in that it has no coherent strategy or platform beyond her being at the center of everything and in its fundamental weirdness. Gabbard has missed 90 percent of her Congressional votes over the past two months to focus on her Presidential campaign, but despite this investment she can’t get past 2% in the polls. She needlessly caused a bitter breakup with the Democratic Party in her own state of Hawaii, and decided to retire from Congress rather than face a primary opponent. She archly announced her “boycott” of the December Democratic Presidential debate in an attempt to ignore the fact that she didn’t qualify for it. Gabbard is a political personality without a program other than to find some home that will give herself relevancy. This doesn’t play well on the Democratic side, and she hasn’t been able to get her campaign off the floor. She auditioned for a job in Trump administration in its early days. She has been running for President in a party that—for good reason—doesn’t trust her, and next November she won’t have a job. She is a frequent guest on Fox News. (Leading supremacist Tucker Carlson is keen on her.)

Gabbard was coy about her impeachment vote beforehand. On the day on which she would be asked to cast the most important vote of her Congressional career, Gabbard was AWOL. She was nowhere to be seen during the six hours of debate. When the vote was called, Gabbard arrived in the chamber in time to take the floor, hike her skirt, piss all over the Constitution and her Democratic colleagues by voting “Present,” and make a hasty exit.

“I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no. I am standing in the center,” Gabbard said in a typically goofy statement after her non-vote. Anyone who still thinks that time has stood still since 1965 and that the American political center is the spot halfway between the Democratic and Republican Party is certifiably insane and part of the problem, not the solution. Given that she committed political suicide yesterday as a Democrat, Gabbard’s career options are obvious: a job with Fox News, a place on Trump’s team, or a third-party Presidential bid. Trump would be thrilled if she choose the latter option. Gabbard and Trump deserve each other.

“This is nothing but a continuation of an internal political struggle, with the party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, trying to reach its goal by different means,” said Mitch McConnell after the vote. Oh, sorry—it was Vladimir Putin who said that.

Nancy Pelosi makes the smart call on impeachment

Nancy Pelosi’s comments yesterday on impeachment were exactly right.

First, here is what she said:

"I'm not for impeachment. This is news. I'm going to give you some news right now because I haven't said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I've been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it."

My key assumption that the goal is to remove Trump from office as quickly as possible. What is the fastest way to get from Point (where we are today) to Point B (a world in which Trump is no longer President)?

Trump has already committed—in public—the impeachable act of obstructing an investigation of him and his campaign.

Members of the House and Senate took an oath to uphold the Constitution, which says that a President who has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” can be impeached by a simple majority vote of the House and removed from office by a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate. Many Democratic members of Congress feel, understandably, that no American is above the law and that they would not be upholding their oath of office if they did not file impeachment charges against a President who is clearly a criminal.

Impeachment and removal from office is not a legal process, despite the fact that the final stage in the Senate is called “a trial.” It is a political process. It has nothing to do with criminal charges. If the 2/3 of the Senate votes to convict the President, he or she is removed from office. Whether the President is indicted later on criminal charges is up to the justice system.

The Democratic-controlled House has the justification and the votes today to draw up articles of impeachment, approve them, and send Trump to the Senate for trial.

Given what we know today about Trump’s many crimes, would the filing of impeachment charges in the House and a trial in the Senate get us to our goal—to Point B?

The answer is, absolutely, “no.”

Anyone who thinks that two thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would convict Trump based on the current, considerable evidence of his crimes has been living on some other planet. TWENTY Republican Senators would have to vote to convict Trump. The GOP senators will only turn against Trump if their base voters in their home state turn against Trump, because they have to survive a Republican primary in order to get reelected. Over 85 percent of Republicans currently support Trump. Conviction in the Senate will not happen.

Given that an impeachment undertaken based on current knowledge will not succeed, what would such an effort accomplish?

• Impeachment would formalize the struggle between Trump partisans and the anti-Trump into an all-out war.

• Impeachment would completely overwhelm the Democratic agenda in Congress. Even though there is no chance of Democratic bills being signed into law during Trump’s term, passing a series a bills in the House is vitally important to retaining Democratic control of that chamber in 2020 because Republicans will be forced to defend their votes during the campaign.

• Democrats in Congress would be able to say that they fulfilled their Constitutional duty.

• Impeachment would be viewed by many in the anti-Trump resistance as a positive move.

• Impeachment would ignite the Trump base, who will feel that the Democrats are trying to overturn the results if the 2016 election.

• Impeachment without conviction would be the ultimate proof that Congress is utterly partisan and irretrievably broken.

• Impeachment without conviction will enable Trump to claim a huge victory against the partisan Democrats and against the investigations into him just before the 2020 election.

• Impeachment without conviction will increase GOP fundraising and voter turnout in the 2020 election, increasing the chances that Trump will be reelected to a second term.

Which brings us to Pelosi’s important caveat—that impeachment would be inevitable if the majority of Americans and Republicans turn against the President. People forget that Nixon was only impeached because he was caught on tape, and the America of 1973 was not as divided on partisan lines as the America of today. I don’t believe that the GOP will ever support Trump’s removal, no matter what he has done or how many guns are smoking.

Pelosi is being very deliberate and smart about her announcement. She made it clear that the door to impeachment is not totally closed. She made her comments prior to the release of the Mueller report to make her preferences clear beforehand. She is right that impeachment without the support if the majority of Americans will hurt the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections. She is taking responsibility as the leader of her caucus for not supporting impeachment at this time in part to allow individual Democratic members of Congress to endorse impeachment if they want to do so. She has the support of Adam Schiff and Gerry Nadler, the Democratic chairmen of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, who are in the process of uncovering the truth about the Trump family crime organization between now and the election.

The best way to remove Trump is to beat him at the polls next year. An attempt to impeach him would only make him a martyr to his supporters and give a new lease on life to his fascist movement. The hard truth—and it’s a very hard truth indeed—is not only that impeachment is doomed in this Congress, it could help to utterly destroy the American experiment by giving another four-year term to a racist, fascist, anti-American President. The 2020 election is the only way to way to get to Point B, and we won’t be successful in that journey if we try to focus on both that contest and impeachment.

Sliced, Peeled, and Delivered

It only took one orbit of the moon for Nancy Pelosi to bring Donald Trump’s massive con to a tweeting halt.

In the six short hours between dawn and noon today we watched as FBI agents (working for free during the Trump shutdown, no less) hauled the genius behind Trump’s wall off to jail and then stared at the grim but intensely satisfying spectacle of a stupefied Trump voluntarily stripping himself naked in the Rose Garden and listlessly committing hari-kari with a dull blade supplied by Stephen Miller.

Trump’s not cooked yet. He won’t go quickly, quietly, or without a lot of ugly agony and last-minute arson. His legacy—Trumpism—will be much harder to destroy, given his daily effort to breathe new life into everything that is ugly in America and in Americans. But his orange blood—lots of it—is billowing in the water now, the great blue sharks and the Federal Barracudas of Investigation are moving in for the kill, and the confounding, secret power he possessed that enabled him to sidestep countless self-inflicted missile strikes that would have destroyed anyone else seems to have finally melted away.

After viciously assaulting, for three years now, every institution designed to keep this country from devolving into a vicious, collective cage match refereed by flying monkeys, Trump turns out to be not a brilliant businessman, political genius, or supreme global strategist but, instead, a thoroughly mediocre schoolyard bully whose specialty was the oldest nastiness in the world—spinning up racial hatred.

Nancy Pelosi has certainly benefited from Trump’s cosmic stupidity and incompetence and from the power granted her by the voters and her party in November. But it was Pelosi, the mother of five children, who knew without a doubt that if you knuckled the Terror of Trumpland square in the face, the walking national nightmare would be quickly transformed into a meek puddle of urine-scented weakness with a red tie floating in the middle of it.

Nancy Pelosi had already made history. She was the first woman Speaker of the House. She passed the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act, the appeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the economic stimulus bills that saved the U.S. economy from cratering after Obama took over. But these notable achievements will be eclipsed by the history she will make over the next two years. She doesn’t want to be President. She has the job she wants and for which she is uniquely qualified—chief architect of Donald Trump’s political destruction—and she has already delivered in ways that would have seemed impossible only a month ago.

There was quite a bit of talk in the media and in progressive political circles after the midterms about what a mistake it would be if Pelosi were again elected Speaker. She was daughter of an old-school political boss, a creature from the Clintonian past, a thirty-two year Congressional barnacle, a filthy-rich corporate Democrat—the antithesis, or at least the enemy, of the bright progressive future for the Democratic Party that Bernie Sanders launched in 2016.

This was both a gross distortion of Nancy Pelosi’s record and a smug dismissal of her considerable talents and her lifelong commitment to an activist government. Not surprisingly, there was no revolt in the House Democratic ranks after the midterms. Pelosi negotiated with the freshmen progressives about committee assignments and promised a changing of the leadership in two to four years, and in the end no one even dared enter the ring against her for the Speakership. Pelosi understands that real political power flows not from wall metaphors or racist fearmongering but from consistency, aggressiveness, relentlessness, and staying true to a position once you’ve staked it out. Not since the days of Roosevelt has the Democratic Party—it’s her party until the 2020 candidate is chosen—so uniformly reflected its leader’s image and positions. With each passing day in which Trump is President and Pelosi is Speaker, the contrast between cluelessness, stupidity, lack of core beliefs, mendacity, and cruelty on the one hand and true leadership on the other will become more stark, to the point where that profound dichotomy will be the defining aspect of this period in American history.

 Trump’s relentless and nauseating public misogyny was the match that torched off the #MeToo movement and the Year of the Woman in politics, so it’s doubly sweet that the burdizzo used in Trump’s neutering today was wielded by a strong, smart woman. Nancy Pelosi is the ideal opposition party leader in these dark days. Thanks to her, today we saw the first glimpse of light at the end of what has too often seemed to be an endless Trumpian tunnel.