These dizzying reversals: when conservatives object that the impeachment farce is ignoring due process, we hear that impeachment is a political process that obeys political rules rather than all those tiresome and legalistic restraints. That's actually close to my own view: impeachments, like elections, are a vehicle for political opposition, not law enforcement. Legal violations affect public opinion indirectly just as they do in elections and other disputes, but the people called upon to make a judgment aren't bound by the same intricate and straitlaced rules that are enforced in a criminal trial.
The prosecuting party in an impeachment, therefore, is technically allowed to throw due process in the trash. The flip-side, however, is that the defense gets to use political tools of its own to ridicule the essentially free choices of the prosecution, and voters are free to decide what they think about it all. So far, to the prosecution's horror, voters are bored or hostile about the results.
Predictably, the anti-Trump camp now begins to worry that their sacred ritual of impeachment is being infected by lowdown politics. Well, if this dumpster fire clears the House and the Senate conducts a trial, they'll get a chance to see how they fare in a more traditional legal setting. Nevertheless, the political problem won't go away. If the charges are as spurious in that more formal trial setting as they are in the current kangaroo court, the political problem will only intensify.
9 comments:
I couldn’t get the link to work.
Nice summary.
We all want things both ways. It doesn't mean we get them.
I agree, Tex.
It's one thing to argue that formal legal rules aren't mandatory for impeachment (that's true).
It's quite another when people argue that ensuring a fair process isn't important (or that the roughly half of the country who voted for Trump or just lean right shouldn't worry about the dangers of forgetting why due process protections and legal definitions exist in the first place).
I think I fixed the link, which is to Adam Gopnik's article in the New Yorker, also linked from RealClearPolitics this morning.
Some random thoughts....
impeachments, like elections, are a vehicle for political opposition, not law enforcement.
Indeed, but they're for misbehaving office holders, politically or legally; they're not for disliked office holders, politically or legally. The Progressive-Democrats are engaged in a naked attempt to undo one political event and to fatally prejudice the next political event.
The flip-side, however, is that the defense gets to use political tools of its own to ridicule the essentially free choices of the prosecution....
Indeed, it'll be interesting to see whether the Senate Republicans will have the stones to a) subpoena Schiff and his whistleblower to testify in open Senate trial, b) to exercise its authority under Jurney v MacCracken to arrest and detain them should they try to refuse to appear/until Schiff reveals his whistleblower's identity, and c) whether CJ Roberts will have the moral courage to allow the subpoenas and possibly subsequent arrests to go forward.
if this dumpster fire clears the House and the Senate conducts a trial
I think it's a foregone conclusion that this will go to the Senate for trial, with at most two Progressive-Democrat votes against. After all, Pelosi's lie to the contrary, this House came into session with the avowed purpose of impeach[ing] the m**cker, as articulated by one of their number in her election victory speech and agreed to nearly unanimously by the silence of the rest of that Party. This is further corroborated by one Michigan Progressive-Democrat who made the mistake of musing out loud that maybe she wasn't convinced by Schiff's show inquisition and then was reeducated into musing out loud that maybe she mused wrongly.
Eric Hines
I'm still not sure I think they'll go to the Senate. They could, of course; the logic of their decisions heretofore almost seems to demand it. But this is really all politics, and they'll lose control of the politics if they go into the Republican-led Senate. They'll have to put up everything they've been suppressing, and be suppressed themselves in turn; and there is close to a zero percent chance of success for all that pain.
They'd have to be fools, in other words. I'm not sure they're not fools, but they'd have to be.
Well, that's certainly consistent with my other, conflicting, view that what the House Progressive-Democrats are doing has nothing to do with impeachment at all, but solely to prejudice the next election, and so they'll continue the smear into next fall.
In either event, look for a drawn out Nadler inquisition, then much agonizing in the House over whether to vote up the Impeachment Articles.
Still, I think the Progressive-Democrats have preached too long and too hard about gotta impeach the President to do anything at all short of impeachment. Which sends the matter to the Senate.
Eric Hines
Grim: I hear you. I'm waiting with bated breath to see if they are. I think they've already done unbelievable damage to Biden, and it will only get worse.
I don't like America's kangaroo courts any more than I liked the Inquisition's trials.
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