Perspective from the 19th Hole

AN UNUSUAL POST FROM ME: TWO VIEWS ON IMPEACHMENT

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

 

Competing propositions:

• What Trump did violated presidential norms and should result in his removal from office.
• What Trump did doesn’t matter because he won in 2016, has blanket immunity as president and should remain in office unless he gets beat in 2020.

Those, essentially, are two views of the Trump impeachment process making the rounds in Washington, D.C.

So, I was struck this week when I read commentaries – one in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and a second in the Washington Post – that came to opposite conclusions on the impeachment process.

The differences suggested to me that the only way to go would be to post these commentaries to illustrate the two views, which are, in many ways, representative of what is going on in America as Trump faces a real threat to his office. The post, therefore, is long, but, to me at least, worth reading.

Paul Waldman from the Washington Post and Dan Henninger from the WSJ are both very capable journalists. Waldman says the Democrats are proceeding effectively to build a case against Trump. Henninger contends the Ds have moved far too quickly and should have waited to oust Trump through the 2020 election.

Whom do you believe? I favor Waldman, given the height, depth and breadth of Trump’s misdeeds. But Henninger’s points also are worth considering.

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Surprise: Democrats are actually mounting an effective impeachment inquiry

By Paul Waldman, Washington Post columnist

If there’s one thing everyone in the political world agrees on, it’s that Democrats are a bunch of screw-ups who can’t get anything right. The impeachment process was supposed to be just one more example: They were fools for not starting it sooner, then they were dumb for starting it at all, then everything about it was supposed to be disastrous.

But now? From both a substantive and political perspective, the impeachment inquiry is going about as well as you could hope. Democrats are, in fact, getting this right.

That’s not to say everything’s been perfect. For instance, the leadership chose to focus on the Ukraine scandal and not include the many other impeachable acts Trump has committed as part of the inquiry. There’s a reasonable case you could make for either approach, but there are certainly plenty of high crimes and misdemeanors just around Ukraine.

So let’s look at where we are now. Keep in mind that we’re in only the first phase of the inquiry, in which depositions are being taken privately from key officials. What have we learned?

Despite the White House’s attempts to obstruct the investigation, several officials have testified, and their accounts of events are beginning to fill in a shocking picture of presidential misdeeds. At this point, it’s undisputed that Trump ordered his “lawyer” Rudolph W. Giuliani to set up a separate, quasi-official Ukraine policy, which Rudy did with his (allegedly criminal) friends, to coerce Ukraine into helping Trump’s reelection. Along the way, Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine, attempting to get the country to mount a probe of Biden that would produce something damaging — or at least provide a justification for Trump to publicly proclaim that Biden was corrupt.

Giuliani’s parallel foreign policy initiative sucked in a range of officials, nearly all of whom understood how inappropriate it was, and many of whom are sharing what they know with Congress.

Every time another one of them testifies, we get alarming new revelations of how unusual, improper and incompetent the whole thing was. Critically, those testifying are not partisan opponents of the president but respected career civil servants who have worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their testimony has been devastating to Trump — and there’s more to come.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are left resorting to buffoonish stunts such as the one they pulled Wednesday, storming a secure room to protest the fact that they were being kept out of a deposition of a Pentagon official — except they weren’t being kept out, because Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee were in the room ready to question the witness, and members of the other two committees participating in the impeachment inquiry were welcome to attend as well.

Their strategy, if you can call it that, is being shaped by the president himself, who cares only about whether Republicans are angrily shouting at a sufficient volume on his behalf. If he turns on Fox News and sees them snarling and red-faced, he thinks he’s winning. Meanwhile, “Republicans have increasingly complained that defending Trump against those accusations is a herculean task made more difficult by the president’s impromptu tweets and the lack of coordinated messaging at the White House.”

The biggest problem Republicans have, however, is the facts. It’s indicative of how brutal this process has been for the administration that the president and his advocates can’t seem to decide on what the defense of him is supposed to be. Are the allegations all fabricated? Did Trump not pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden to help his reelection campaign, or was it completely fine that he did so? Was there no quid pro quo, or are quid pro quos good? Whatever they’re saying today, they’ll probably be saying something different tomorrow. They can’t decide because there is so little ambiguity around what Trump did, and no good way to justify it.

Which is why the methodical approach the Democrats are taking is working well. In the current phase, they’re gathering testimony from officials, which is adding up to a damning indictment of the president. Then next month, they’ll move to public hearings, which will provide dramatic, made-for-TV moments in which Trump’s abuse of power will be laid bare.

This will then lead almost inevitably to a vote on impeach. The president is unlikely to be convicted in the Senate, which would require 20 Republican senators voting to remove him, but by then Democrats will have done all they could to gather information, display his wrongdoing for the public to see and understand, and impose what accountability they can.

And according to polls, it’s already working. Up until a few weeks ago, a majority of Americans opposed impeachment, but that has flipped. Now the polls show a plurality, or in some cases a majority, saying Trump should be impeached.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that next month’s public hearings will finally show that the whole thing is a witch hunt, that Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) suddenly display competence and dismantle witnesses so skillfully that the entire American people realize how innocent Trump is. It’s also possible that by next month I’ll be the starting point guard for the Golden State Warriors.

More likely, the process from this point forward will make Trump’s malfeasance even more clear and widely understood. Republicans will continue to flail as they try desperately to find a defense of Trump that doesn’t sound ludicrous. The president himself will grow more unhinged, rage-tweeting day after day in order to keep his base from abandoning him. And all of it will play out against the backdrop of the 2020 election, when the voters get to decide if they want four more years of this.

It’s almost as if the Democrats know what they’re doing.

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Pelosi’s Impeachment Blunder

By Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page editor, WSJ

Nancy Pelosi had the Democrats’ impeachment strategy right the first time: Don’t do it. But apparently even a lifetime in the mud-filled trenches of politics wasn’t enough to toughen the House speaker against the Democratic left’s compulsion to impeach Donald Trump.

Anyone of any political stripe knows that the most psychologically distressed Democrats have wanted to impeach this guy, somehow just get rid of him, from day one.

Before Democrats regained control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, the Trump takedown was supposed to result from the Russian-collusion narrative, which got up to speed in January 2017 and then steamrolled across the country for two years of media leaks and the Mueller investigation, ultimately and fantastically going nowhere.

Within a day of the Mueller report’s release, dismissing the Russian-collusion story lines, the opposition pivoted to the obstruction-of-justice narrative. Somehow, the pivoters must have assumed that the American people, after enduring the Mueller odyssey, would not notice that this extraordinarily disruptive investigation had come to nothing. And that people would saddle up to join the next get-Trump posse. That didn’t work.

We’ll pause in our own narrative to posit a de minimis level of legitimacy to what they’ve done. If the opposition party and, in our unique times, the opposition press want to spend what capital and credibility they have in a round-the-clock effort to take down a sitting president, that’s their prerogative. Nothing in the Constitution says elected officials are obliged to do anything productive.

But translating the public’s votes into a permanent presidential takedown had better work, because if they don’t pull off impeachment and drive Donald Trump out of public life next year, the losses for the Democrats and the media will be devastating. It’s the familiar do-or-die stakes of trying to take out the king.

Because Donald Trump loves living dangerously, he and the increasingly mysterious Rudy Giuliani handed his opponents the unexpected excitement of the Ukraine-Biden narrative—and at last an opening for impeachment. The New York Times, delirious at the prospect, has even created an ominous little logo for its coverage, typically several pages a day—“The 45th President: Impeachment.”

Maybe it really will be the third time’s the charm for the Trump-elimination forces, but the impeachment project looks like it’s starting to go wobbly.

For starters, it’s still just sort-of an impeachment. There’s been no vote in the House and no sign the Judiciary Committee is drawing up articles of impeachment, as in the past. Instead, Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee is interviewing Ukraine-related State Department officials—in secret hearings. It resembles a show trial, with the “public” parts emerging as selective leaks to the impeachment press.

But the most telling impeachment development this week wasn’t any paraphrased testimony from Mr. Schiff’s private hearings. It was the news that Speaker Pelosi’s impeachment timetable has been delayed “to sharpen their case” for doing it.

It is now evident that a vote to impeach President Trump isn’t likely to occur before Thanksgiving, as many assumed, but will slip to December. Then, of course, the trial phase will pass to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Mr. McConnell reportedly wanted it all over by the end of the year, but what’s the rush? The Trump trial could run through January—31 priceless campaign days before the Democratic Party’s intensely competitive primaries. The Iowa caucus vote is Feb. 3, then comes New Hampshire’s primary on Feb. 11; Nevada’s caucuses are Feb. 22; and the crucially important South Carolina primary arrives Feb. 29.

Instead of competing for their party’s nomination, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Michael Bennet will spend invaluable campaign time planted on Capitol Hill during the days that the Pelosi-Schiff Trump trial drones on. Sens. Sanders and Harris can’t call Mr. Trump the “most corrupt president” in the history of the country and then skip out on the trial of public enemy No. 1 to campaign in a downstate Iowa diner.

Joe Biden, Mayor Pete, and Hillary’s new friend Rep. Tulsi Gabbard get to romp daily through the primary states, but who’s going to notice with the Trump impeachment trial siphoning away the nation’s media’s attention?

Surely Nancy Pelosi knew when she stood firm against opening the impeachment dam that the interests of her party’s anti-Trump compulsives—nearly all from safe seats—and her party’s broader election interests were not aligned.

The left has always believed that some deus ex machina, such as Robert Mueller or a nonstop storm of negative press stories, would magically make the Trump presidency just go away—rather than the more plausible likelihood that the relentlessly combustible Mr. Trump would eventually discredit himself in the eyes of most voters.

The American left throughout its existence has had a deep mistrust of the U.S. system, so rather than wait until November 2020 for voters to sort all this out, we get this crypto-impeachment. Like the sure-thing election of 2016, it too could backfire.