Muddled

I’ve been mostly positive about the approach that Democratic leaders have taken to the Trump scandals. Those leaders, starting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have insisted on investigating President Trump’s business practices and his 2016 campaign. But the Democrats have also shown some sensible restraint.

Rather than rushing into impeachment hearings as soon as they won House control, they understood that such hearings wouldn’t necessarily persuade more Americans of Trump’s unfitness for office. They have instead vowed to hold hearings that will lay out the evidence of Trump’s misbehavior.

The problem is that the Democrats haven’t actually held many hearings. With the Mueller investigation now completed, I think it’s getting to be time for Democrats to stop explaining what they are going to do and start doing it.

As is, the Democrats’ message is becoming muddled. Both House and Senate Democrats insist that Trump has committed grave offenses that are damaging the country (which he has). In response, they are doing … relatively little. The combination, as my colleague Michelle Goldberg has written, is “increasingly incoherent.”

Remember how much information the Michael Cohen hearing produced and how much attention it generated? It was an excellent example of how Congress can shine light on a president’s wrongdoing. The House should now insist on calling Robert Mueller to testify, even if Mueller would prefer to avoid the spotlight. They should fight, in court if need be, to call any Trump aides or associates who have relevant information.

Until Democrats act, the party’s message about Trump’s wrongdoing is likely to remain unpersuasive to anyone who isn’t already persuaded.

[T]he real reasons for Democratic hesitation on impeachment are obvious enough. Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to remove Trump, and fear an acquittal in that chamber could embolden him. A majority of voters is not yet convinced that impeachment is warranted, even if they believe Trump is a criminal. Many newly elected Democrats in swing districts don’t want to have to vote on impeachment, and Democrats fear a backlash similar to the one Republicans faced after impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998.

All these hazards are real. But there are also dangers if Democrats fail to take their appraisal of Trump to its logical conclusions. Following public opinion on impeachment, as opposed to attempting to shape it, makes them look weak and vacillating. Endless calls for further investigation send the message that the staggering corruption and abuse of power that Trump has already engaged in is somehow tolerable. And as Brian Beutler has pointed out, if Democrats don’t seize the offensive in both procedural and narrative terms, Republicans will, pressing on with their Benghazi-style investigations into the origins of the Russia probe while inviting even more foreign help in 2020.

The point of impeachment is not to remove Trump before the 2020 election. It is to make clear, in the starkest possible way, why Democrats believe he should be removed. The remainder of his term should be consumed by a formal, televised presentation of all the ways he’s disgraced his office. It’s true that were Trump to be re-elected after such a reckoning, he might be even further unleashed. But were Trump to be re-elected in the absence of impeachment, it would still be seen as a vindication for him, and would leave Democrats humiliated by their excess of caution.

Some Democrats might fear a repeat of the mistakes Republicans made when they impeached Clinton two decades ago, but this suggests a lack of faith in their own leadership. Clinton was impeached for covering up sex with an intern. Were Trump to be impeached, it would be for covering up his entanglements, financial and otherwise, with a hostile foreign power, blatantly profiting from his office, declaring himself above the law, and demanding freedom from oversight as the price of fulfilling ordinary presidential responsibilities. If Democratic politicians don’t believe they can make the public see the difference between these two impeachment scenarios, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.

Besides, the notion that Republicans suffered a devastating rebuke as a result of the Clinton impeachment is overblown. Republicans kept the House in the 1998 midterms, though Democrats gained five seats. Clinton was damaged enough that his vice president, Al Gore, held him at a distance while running to succeed him. In the 2000 election, Republicans won the presidency, kept the House, and narrowly took the Senate, giving them trifecta control of government for the first time in nearly half a century. Can this really be the cautionary tale that’s frightening Democrats from doing all they can to hold a lawless president to account?

At the Center for American Progress conference, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised Representative Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican who, on in a Twitter thread on Saturday, laid out the ways that Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct.” Responding to Amash’s case against the president, members of the wealthy family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said they were cutting off their financial support for the congressman. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which Amash helped found, condemned him, and he’s facing a primary challenge.

“The fact that he is willing to risk his seat shows a lot of the courage of that conviction, and that has been in very short supply,” Schiff told the audience. He added, “Courage is contagious, but so is cowardice.” He’s right, but not just about Republicans.