Democrats Should Proudly Call for Trumps Impeachment
Democrats Should Proudly Call for Trump’s Impeachment
Some rank-and-file members are doing it. Why aren't the party's leaders showing the same courage of conviction?
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
May 22, 2017
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It is certainly awkward that Trump made himself vulnerable to impeachment so quickly after inauguration, but that is a testament to his overreach, not Democrats’.
The central risk of admitting this publicly isn’t overreach so much as over-promising. Republicans in Congress aren’t likely to impeach Trump, and even if Democrats reclaim control of both the House and Senate next year, removing him from office would require many Republicans to vote to convict him. But this is only a problem if Democrats are incapable of distinguishing between the abstract merits of impeaching Trump and the political feasibility of it. By impeaching Clinton, Republicans demonstrated that it’s possible for the political climate to allow for the impeachment of officials who do not deserve it. Our current circumstances are precisely backward. Trump deserves impeachment urgently, but politics will insulate him from it for the foreseeable future.
But that shouldn’t spook Democrats out of telling voters they understand how critical removing Trump from office is—and that they will fight as hard as they can to do so, even if they ultimately fall short. In many ways the 2016 Democratic primary underscored the importance of finding this very kind of middle ground between promising to deliver popular ends—like Medicare for all—and opposing those ends outright on political-feasibility grounds. The promise to fight is an easy promise to keep.
“I know that there are those who are talking about ‘Well, we’re gonna get ready for next election,’” Waters, the House Democrat, rightly said last week. “No. We can’t wait that long. We don’t need to wait that long. He will have destroyed this country by then. We cannot wake up every morning to another crisis, to another scandal.”
It is extremely unlikely that Trump will find remedies for the problems he’s created for himself by the end of next year—that he will liquidate his business, disclose his finances, nominate a consensus FBI director, and be fully exonerated by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller. Unless Trump does, he should not be president, and politicians aren’t serving the public well by pretending otherwise.
MORE:
https://newrepublic.com/article/142794/democrats-proudly-call-trumps-impeachment
