Lawfare: What if the House held impeachment proceedings and nobody noticed? [View all]

[pnwmom]

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-if-house-held-impeachment-proceedings-and-nobody-noticed

Between a string of mass shootings, the ongoing Democratic presidential primary and a shuffle of senior intelligence leaders, even political junkies seemed to take little notice of the news that the House of Representatives has begun officially and publicly moving forward with investigations to invoke its solemn, constitutionally ordained “sole power” to impeach the president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the age of Trump, it seems, not even the beginning of impeachment proceedings offers a national moral inflection point.

Part of the confusion, though, is that Democrats seem to have deliberately avoided the dramatic moment that a whole-House vote to authorize a formal impeachment inquiry would provide. Perhaps House Democrats fear Trump would hijack any such moment to paint Democrats as both extreme and feckless. Perhaps they fear that initiating impeachment proceedings, rather than simply conducting them without formally invoking an impeachment process, would crowd out the ability to move forward on other legislation. Perhaps they have backed into impeachment “proceedings” as a compromise among different views about impeachment within their caucus; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi certainly wants to protect her majority by shielding red-state Democrats from a vote that she apparently does not think would help them retain their seats in November of 2020.

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Nadler’s statement is also an undefined but palpable admission that Trump’s persistent attacks on norms, which have desensitized Americans to each subsequent outrage, demand a different approach to removing a president. Before 2016, and perhaps even until the release of the Mueller report, it might have seemed that if a president were to cross some undefined threshold, outrage would demand impeachment proceedings as the next logical step.

Trump, however, has presided over a change in the political culture. The country has a president who commits one heinous deed after another, says one outrageous thing after another, and so habitually and consistently violates the country’s sense of appropriate presidential behavior that each successive offense gets a lesser reaction. Actions that would have brought previous presidents widespread opprobrium now pass by every few days with little more than collective shrugs from politicians and pundits. There’s no one moment at which it seemed that this particular act clearly crossed the line between unproductive but grudgingly acceptable behavior and undeniably impeachable activity. Each new misdeed has prompted a slightly smaller, notably less effective response.