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The second-best joke of all time about Washington goes something like this:
[A] freshman member of the House…is getting shown around by a senior member on his first day, and the freshman asks about the other party. “I want to meet the enemy,” he says. “No, son,” says the old bull, “they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”
The greatest DC joke ever is usually attributed to JFK:
Washington is a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.
The only problem with those two gags is that they are no longer entirely true.
Inter-chamber hostilities have taken a backseat to the Blue-Red tribalism that singularly animates our politics — and our culture more broadly.
And the nation’s capital, if not quite at Southern charm and northern efficiency levels, has come miles since the 1960s on both scores.
Which brings us to a paraphrase of the fourth-best line of the Riddler on Batman:
What does no president want to have but no president want to lose?
Answer: an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Now that it is clear that there will be no quicky, pre-inaugural such proceeding against Donald Trump, the more I think about it, the less clear it is to me what the actual point of Chuck Schumer pursuing this matter is.
What are the reasons not to go forward?
1. It will take up House of Lords’ bandwidth from the Biden agenda.
2. It will inflame partisan tensions at a time when Biden is looking to unite the country and work across the aisle.
3. It could turn Trump into (more of) a martyr, increasing his political power and allowing him to somewhat hijack the Biden agenda.
4. It will hold much of the media attention on Trump, and away from Biden-Harris.
5. Perhaps most of all, it seems somewhere between likely and highly likely that there won’t be sufficient votes to convict or that the courts will rule that the Senate can’t try and bar from public office a president who is an ex president.
I’m no lawyer but I play one in a morning newsletter and it seems pretty clear where the balance of legal opinion is on this one.
Why put us all through whip counts and speculation about how Mitch McConnell and other Republican Senators might vote, as well as endless discussions of the process, how Trump feels about it, why Biden isn’t doing more to stop it, etc etc etc. if all that is going to happen is that Trump is acquitted (still more likely than not) or that he goes to court and puts a stop to (or nullifies) the whole thing?
(That’s assuming he finds at least one moderately competent lawyer to handle the matter for him.)
After Wednesday, it isn’t entirely clear to me how McConnell, Biden, or Trump feel about the prospect of a Senate trial – or, as important, what they plan to do about getting what they want.
But here is something that IS clear: There is nothing about a Senate trial that is helpful to Biden’s already complicated task of balancing partisan versus bipartisan options for getting his early legislative initiatives through the Congress.
A process fight that is bound to be divisive and partisan (even if it ends with McConnell and enough other Republicans joining in a bipartisan vote to convict and bar Trump) is completely inconsistent with Biden’s attempts to simultaneously unite American/DC and solve the big immediate challenges on the pandemic, the economy, immigration, health care, and infrastructure.
No matter what the outcome of the process is.
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This is all going to play out big time over the next week and beyond, but here are the three most important data points for you to watch on all this right now:
1. Biden plans a thematic/policyish speech in the 7pm ET hour Thursday night that is intended to lay out his initial policy priorities and vision. While I will be fascinated to see how much coverage this oddly timed address gets in the media, I bet it will not be as much as the incumbent gets for doing (or not doing) whatever.
If you peruse the essential reading Washington Post and Wall Street Journal pieces on what Biden plans to put on offer regarding his initial big pandemic relief package, your eyes will be naturally drawn to the process battles that will undergird his efforts – how to sequence and pace attempts at bipartisan cooperation with the ram-it-through urgency of the reconciliation process.
Don’t be confused: these are not two great choices, but rather both messy, time consuming, perilous options, neither of which is going to be made easier or more enticing by an impeachment trial.
2. There’s a buoyant theory burbling around at the highest levels of the conservative punditocracy that suggests that the Democrats are pursuing the impeachment process because the only force that binds them and animates their donors/grassroots is disdain for Donald Trump.
In other words, they can’t quit him or let him leave the stage.
Per Tucker Carlson:
Many Democrats have nothing in common with each other. Once Donald Trump leaves the scene and it's time to divvy up the spoils of the United States Treasury to begin the great piñata party of 2021, various components within the Democratic Party -- the fabled communities you hear so much about -- will turn on each other with feral ferocity. It's going to be ugly.
Democrats would like to delay that disaster as long as they can, so they need to keep Donald Trump at the center of the conversation. They're impeaching him so they can continue to give speeches about him. It's that simple.
And, similarly, per the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger on his view of Nancy Pelosi’s “pro-Trump” posture:
[N]othing the Democrats had on offer exceeded Donald Trump’s ability to produce votes for her party….
With the impeachment vote, Speaker Pelosi is abandoning not only Mr. Biden’s presumed rationale for his campaign—normalcy—but also putting at risk the new president’s legislative agenda. Mr. Biden’s statement that the Senate could spend a half day conducting a trial of the impeached president and a half day approving the new president’s nominees or proposals is delusional. A second Senate trial will obsess and consume the whole world. For now, Mr. Biden’s agenda is Mrs. Pelosi’s agenda….
The Pelosi calculus is that the system’s continued pain hurts the other side more.
3. The third point is that, despite ten House Republicans voting to impeach, Kevin McCarthy laying some blame at Trump’s doorstop, and Mitch McConnell doing whatever it is he is doing, every player in this drama has to grapple with the continued dominance the president has over the Trump Party (which is still the dominant force in the Republican Party).
Behold these poll numbers in the Trump supporter column:
This poll does not bold well for either Joe Biden or the wing of the Republican Party which wishes to move to a post-Trump era and to repair the damage the incumbent has caused with the fat cat donor base.
Again, Tucker:
By impeaching the president during his final week in office, Congress will not succeed in discrediting Trump among Republican voters. In fact, it will enhance Donald Trump among Republican voters, obviously. Who does your average Republican voter trust more, Donald Trump or the many people who hate Donald Trump? Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell? Donald Trump or CNN? You know the answer.
Again, Henninger:
The Republican Party and the conservative movement need to turn Donald Trump himself into history. And then get on with discovering what Trumpism was and was not. It was in part a cult of personality broadly related to the idea of the “forgotten man.” But beyond that, the details of the Trump movement aren’t so clear.
Is Trumpism really protectionism and isolationism? Does blue-collar populism exclude the suburbs from its coalition? Why did Mr. Trump appeal to minority voters? Does economic opportunity emerge primarily from a productive private economy, the Reagan model—or, as some post-Reaganite conservatives now argue, should it be led by federal spending and tax credits for families and education?...
Republicans cannot avoid coming to terms with the Trump base. That portion of his base that Mr. Trump said, with great insight in early 2016, would have let him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, is likely to shrink below 30%. But if half of them refuse to turn out for Republican candidates—Mrs. Pelosi’s goal—Republicans may not win for the next two presidential election cycles and lose many congressional seats.
If it were still possible to think in America’s best, long-term interests, the most statesmanlike thing Mr. Biden could do would be to pardon Donald Trump and move the country past its current destructive disorders.
He won’t. The furies would scream.
There is zero doubt that Donald Trump has been greatly weakened by innumerable metrics that matter in the span of just a few days. There is also zero doubt that it is perilous for anyone to jump to the conclusion that that weakening extends to his base or to his movement.
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The anger and demand for justice that fueled the unprecedentedly rapid House impeachment process and is propelling the Senate towards a trial are as apparent as they are on many levels warranted.
All indications are that there will be a Schumer-led process that results in a lot of planning for a Senate trial that Democrats (and not an insignificant number of Republicans, including some Senators) hope ends in conviction and the banning of Trump from future public office.
Let me be the fifteenth to say that such a trial might not be in the interest of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or the nation – and let me be among the first to say that, via the courts or some other way, such a trial might not ever take place.
And let me also be the seventy-fourth to say that if Joe Biden can move his agenda through the bipartisan/partisan zero-sum matrix during an impeachment trial, he would be doing more than walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Which is, when you think about it, really not that hard.
I would say it would be more akin to walking, glass blowing, and making an origami crane at the same time.
