With some caveats to account for further noncompliance with congressional subpoenas, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt urges the Democrats against impeaching President Trump. His basic argument is horribly flawed, which is a shame because it’s possible to actually make a compelling case against going forward with an impeachment inquiry.
Hiatt tells us that Trump should not be impeached simply for being who he is and who we all knew he was when we went to the polls in November 2016. He identifies five primary reasons why Trump could be thrown out of office and then explains why they’re insufficient. Here’s the one he considers the best rationale for removal:
The strongest argument for impeachment may be that Trump is unfit for office. He lies; he divides; he flouts constitutional norms, embraces dictators and spews hateful rhetoric. He is ignorant and impetuous, temperamentally and philosophically unfit.
All true. In fact, our editorial board said as much when he was nominated in 2016. “Uniquely unqualified to serve as president,” we wrote. “A Trump presidency would be dangerous for the nation and the world.”
I think we’ve been proved right. But that is precisely the point: We thought his unfitness was evident before he was elected, and Americans chose him anyway.
It’s somewhat silly to say that the people didn’t agree with the Washington Post in 2016 so the Post feels duty-bound to stop trying to convince the people in 2019. But Hiatt goes further and suggests that everyone knew the facts about Trump when they voted for him which, if true, would have made it unnecessary for the Post to continue to report on his bad behavior. If true, there would be no point in anyone reading the Mueller report.
To impeach him now for what the electorate welcomed or was willing to overlook isn’t the democratic response. The right response is to defeat him in 2020.
The second reason Hiatt feels that Trump might merit impeachment is that he “benefited from foreign interference in the 2016 election.” Supposedly, everyone knew the extent of this on Election Day, too.
But, again, the broad outlines were known before the election — he invited Russia’s help, he crowed about WikiLeaks’ publication of stolen Democratic emails — and, again, he was elected anyway.
Yet, that is not even close to true. On October 31, 2016, the New York Times ran an article with the following headline:
That was the last pre-election verdict of “the paper of record.” How, then, could the American people be said to have known the broad outlines of the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. How many of the campaign’s 272 contacts with Russian-linked operatives were common knowledge at that point. For that matter, how many of them are common knowledge today?
No one knew about the now infamous Trump Tower meeting or the efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. No one knew about Paul Manafort sharing polling data with a suspected GRU intelligence officer or his offering to give private briefings to Oleg Deripaska in return for debt relief. It’s simply untrue that the American people understood the depth of these connections, and that’s leaving aside everything that was done after the voting as if it were not actually more important than anything that happened during the campaign.
When Hiatt turns to Trump’s actual performance in office, he sounds like a defense lawyer.
What about his refusal since the election to admit the obvious truth about Russian assistance or to defend the nation against future attack? What about his cozying up to the chief perpetrator, Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Disgusting, and suspicious.
But before impeaching on this ground you would also have to consider his administration’s policy. U.S. Cyber Command has been staffed up, and a warning cyber operation was launched against Russia before the 2018 midterms. Sanctions imposed for Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine remain in place, and Ukraine was provided with defensive weapons. Not enough has been done, but the government hasn’t been inert, either.
This argument is almost beneath contempt. The Trump administration has occasionally acknowledged that Russia intervened in the election and hacked into election databases, but they haven’t done so consistently and they have been widely criticized for their inaction. Here’s a CNN piece from April that talks about the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to protect the 2020 elections from foreign interference:
Attempted Russian interference in US public affairs has continued as Department of Homeland Security officials and senior leaders have alerted the White House about the risks ahead of the 2020 presidential election — but it was “like pulling teeth” to get the White House to pay attention, a US government official told CNN Wednesday.
One reason for the difficulty, according to the official, is that “in general, senior White House staff felt it wasn’t a good idea to bring up issues related to Russia in front of the President.”
Officials have “spent months and months trying to sound alarm at the White House about the need to take foreign interference more seriously and elevate the issue,” the official said…
This is somehow mitigated according to Hiatt by the fact that the president has been unable to find a way to lift sanctions on Russia and has acceded to some weapons transfers to Ukraine. If Hiatt read his own newspaper, he would know Trump has said, “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.” He’d know that Trump explained to a G7 dinner in 2018 that “Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world” and that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia because everyone who lives there speaks Russian. Then he left the meeting and told the world that Russia should be readmitted to the G7 so it could become the G8 again.
Hiatt goes on to excuse Trump’s efforts to obstruct Mueller’s probe by arguing that some of his more egregious acts were never carried out and that Trump could certainly have obstructed more but refrained from doing so.
Finally, Hiatt says that Congress could have done more to curtail Trump’s abuses of power but didn’t use all their powers to restrain him. Therefore, Congress has forfeited the right to hold him accountable for breaking laws, selling weapons to dictators and committing crimes against humanity at the border.
And he concludes:
Trump should not be impeached for inclinations, no matter how vile, that were not acted upon. He should not be impeached out of frustration with the pusillanimous failure of Republicans in the House and Senate to stand up for congressional prerogative and constitutional norms.
And Congress should think very hard before impeaching Trump for the high crime of being who we knew he was before we elected him.
This makes no moral or logical sense at all. Could we impeach a president for ordering an unprovoked nuclear strike if the order was not carried out? Is the only way for Congress to fight back against a rogue president to starve the government of funding and attempt to override vetoes? And can a president only be impeached for things we knew about him before his election, even when we didn’t know most of the really damning things about him until after he assumed the office?
Hiatt should take a few moments and read Greg Sargent’s research on public opinion during the Watergate scandal. It’s published in the Washington Post too, and that’s a newspaper that really ought to have some institutional memory about Richard Nixon’s demise. What Sargent found is that even days before Nixon resigned, only 31 percent of Republican voters thought he should be impeached. But that was up from six percent before the impeachment inquiry began. What changed even more was the opinion of independents that went from 18 percent to 55 percent.
In other words, you don’t judge a book before you open the cover. Trump should be impeached for the all the reasons that Hiatt identified and then dismissed.
We expected anything other than this drivel from that man? He’s part of what’s so fundamentally wrong about the Stenographic, corporate media around the Beltway. This piece alone gets him a high tumbrel number right up there with the likes of Mrs Greenspan, Chris Fucking Cilizza and a dozen other notables.
Hiatt seems to think that impeachment is something you do when you don’t like the policies or actions of a president. It is nothing of the sort. Impeachment is something you do if and when the president has done something illegal. It is something you should do in such a case.
At the time of the election, no one knew whether Trump was actually guilty of something illegal. Now (not then) we have the report of a lengthy investigation into the matter. Paraphrasing, the report would have explicitly cleared him if it could, and it did not. That means there are grounds for believing that he did break the law. That is when you do an impeachment hearing, and decide if there is enough evidence to send an impeachment finding to the Senate.
Since when has Fred Hiatt ever been right about anything?
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And then there’s Josh Marshall continuing to say that impeachment would be a waste of time….sighhh
I think you are too kind to Hiatt. His argument was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, so much that it really made me wonder if he is suffering from some kind of neurological issue.
It is also arrogant and oddly solipsistic. He seems to be saying, “since we at the Washington Post warned the public that Trump might be an incompetent neofascist, the public has no right to use the [perfectly constitutional] methods available to rectify the situation.” I suppose he thinks that if he hadn’t written such a strong anti-Trump editorial before the election, then impeachment would be ok. He seems to have a very odd view of the role of Washington Post editorial in our constitutional system.
And…not to belabor the point, there are PLENTY of people who voted for Trump who didn’t see through him, and were just hoping for the best.
As disingenuous as the editorial is, and as flawed as the arguments are, my first thought was that Pelosi somehow had a hand in it, just as the Post sometimes publishes press releases on her behalf disguised as interviews.
I’m a little puzzled by this. If there is a genuinely compelling case that could even begin to hold its own against the arguments pro, I have yet to see it presented. (The Speaker certainly has not done so; all she’s produced are transparent dodges, a new dodge every few days, that basically boil down to the unspoken “my consultants tell me not to begin proceedings, and after all, I’d have absolutely no clue how to pull such a thing off.”)
Try “she knows she doesn’t yet have the votes to pass a resolution for an impeachment inquiry, much less Articles of Impeachment.” (I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t know that it isn’t. But if true, seems like “a genuinely compelling case”. Or perhaps you’d elucidate for us the benefits/advantages of calling a vote on formally going forward with impeachment . . . that fails to pass.)
Please. If Pelosi wants to begin an inquiry, of course she will have the votes.
Last December, dozens of caucus members voted to advance articles of impeachment when they knew they didn’t stand a chance of passing. After the Democrats took the House, many of them did a complete 180 only because Pelosi laid down the party line. If Pelosi reverses, so will they. (I don’t know how many of them are included among the five dozen currently supporting an inquiry. As of last week, I know not all of them were.)
As for the other three quarters of the caucus: when someone such as Hill goes on the record two weeks ago saying “Many of us [most “vulnerable” members] are hitting a point where we feel like what is morally right, and what is within our personal obligation, is more important than what might end up happening within the voters’ perspectives,” she is telling you that if Pelosi commits to an inquiry, so will many of them.
In other words, the votes are available and just waiting for Pelosi’s permission.
Any other “genuinely compelling case[s]”?
Sorry, that’s idiotic. Asserts multiple “facts” not in evidence. Specifically, asserts multiple mere conjectures on your part as facts (e.g., “If Pelosi wants to begin an inquiry, of course she will have the votes”). In contrast, I was up-front in disclosing not knowing what I don’t know.
In fact, much Reality recommends a hypothesis that Pelosi keeps tamping down expectations of very quickly proceeding to formal impeachment because she knows the votes aren’t (yet) there for it to pass. It is bone-simple obvious as an explanation (Ockham likes it, too!). Again, as I said right at the outset, I’m not asserting that that is the case. Just that it’s a very obvious explanation (and, if correct, yes indeed a “genuinely compelling case”. Duh!) Also that it is concordant with the number of Reps who’ve come out publicly in support of proceeding immediately to a formal impeachment inquiry (i.e., still a relatively small minority). If there’s one thing Pelosi’s good at, it’s counting votes.
Again, please. If your “obvious explanation” is true, only then is it a compelling case? Great: and I presented some of the evidence and thinking that leads me to conclude that the explanation is flawed.
Let’s try this again. Here’s a little more of the evidence and thinking:
Pelosi has been working for months to minimize any public support for an inquiry, doing her best to keep “investigations” out of the news, by limiting “investigation” to the occasional request or subpoena that is predictably snubbed, and keeping “investigative” hearings from committee dockets. The state of New York just handed her a ticket to Individual-1’s tax returns, for example, and she is stalling. And she “doesn’t have the votes”? Imagine that!
Let’s say, however, that Pelosi actually wanted to develop support for an inquiry in her caucus and among the public, even while maintaining the face of disinterested judiciousness and actively “tamping down expectations of very quickly proceeding to formal impeachment.” It seems obvious that the political master would have her deputies go about things very differently. There certainly is more than enough material for her committee chairs to work with, witnesses (such as Andrew Weissman) who are no longer connected to the government who would appear before them, and Pelosi could remain above it all. Even in spite of her efforts to avoid the whole business, including increasingly embarrassing excuses, a quarter of her caucus has gone on record opposing her, and public support pro an impeachment inquiry has risen to 46%, now even with con. In other words, the evidence (including your “much Reality”) indicates, if Pelosi does not have the votes, that is the case largely because she has been working very hard for months not to have them. (In this context, consider Hill’s statement above.) By the same token, should Pelosi ever decide to have her deputies marshal the available material to develop public support for an inquiry, given where the public and the most “vulnerable” members of her caucus are now in spite of her efforts, it is hard to imagine that the political master would have much of a problem finding the votes in fairly short order.
So no, “she doesn’t have the votes,” while it may be true at this very moment in the most literal sense, is not a compelling argument.
Well, since you insist on declaring your perceptions, opinions, conjectures, etc., to be facts (slapping the label “evidence” onto an assertion of “fact” that isn’t — that is instead your perception or subjective characterization — does not suffice to make it actual evidence!), e.g.,
. . . and since the concepts of fact, evidence, hypothesis, etc., are apparently beyond your ken (e.g.,
. . . Well, duh (with the critical correction to “an obvious explanation”, aka a perfectly plausible hypothesis to explain the facts-in-evidence known to us), that’s what I’ve said from the start! . . .
. . . there seems no point in continuing this “discussion”. Until you can grasp those basic concepts and constrain yourself to asserting as “facts” or “evidence” only what are indeed facts and evidence, it could only continue at cross-purposes.
interesting
Agree. Especially you responding at considerable length as if you had not even read what I wrote, e.g.,
(Your complete dodge of that last sentence also “interesting”.)
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Weird. I clicked the 5th star. How does that make my rating “4.5” instead of 5.0?
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