The mirage of impeachment
To try to leverage a violent mob’s physical assault on the United States Congress into reversing the outcome of the presidential election is pretty much the most impeachable offense that I can imagine. And on paper what’s supposed to happen is the House votes on articles of impeachment and then the senate holds a trial.
But the constitutional bar for removal is very high — 67 senators.
How high a bar is that? Well in an election where Trump lost the national popular vote by 4 points, there are 23 states with 46 senators representing states that he safely won by five points or more. And it’s made particularly difficult because it’s a collective action problem. Even if, I dunno, Jerry Moran were to prefer that Trump be removed he’d still be better off with someone else being the guy who does the removing. Doing the right thing to save the Republic would be an excellent idea. But you need something like a dozen true statesmen among the Senate GOP caucus to make that plausible, and I don’t think there are a dozen. To remove Trump is just very very hard.
So while I think it’s easy to say “the solution to an unfit president is removal not for the military to go rogue” that’s a bit of an unrealistic view of the situation facing Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley and the rest of the top brass.
After all, suppose they’d gotten on the phone to Mitch McConnell and said “Sorry, Senator, the only way we can send in the national guard and save you from a rampaging mob is for you to swiftly vote to remove Trump from office first.” Even if that had worked (which seems implausible) it would not exactly have been a triumph of civil/military relations for the Joint Chiefs to order the Senate to impeach the President. The military, to its credit, is trying to preserve the forms of constitutional government, even while violating its substance, because all the alternatives are worse.
Pelosi’s choice
The argument that Pelosi should go along with the charade rather than signaling that she’s confident the military will do the right thing has some merit to it.
But just as senate Republicans are politicians who need to navigate their constituents’ views, so is Nancy Pelosi. She leads the House Democratic caucus and her members want to know what she’s doing about the fact that the President’s long-visible unfitness is now provoking acute crisis in the final weeks of his administration. And those caucus members are answerable to rank-and-file voters who are understandably disturbed about what they saw on Thursday and wondering what else might happen.
Perhaps she should be rushing faster with impeachment. But even if she did that, speedy removal would not be the outcome.
Signaling to the military that congressional leaders would prefer that they take their cues from Pence rather than Trump is not an option available to the Speaker under the text of the US Constitution. But it is clearly a thing that she as a human being is able to do. To do it, and then to reassure the public that it has been done, thus calming the situation, strikes me as a responsible course of action.
The constitutional process of impeachment remains an important part of this. Not in my view because it stands any reasonable odds of leading to Trump’s removal. But both as a statement of principle by the House, and also as a warning to Trump that if he takes further flagrantly inappropriate steps such as pardoning the rioters that he will be removed.
It’s a bad system
All that being said, while I defend everyone’s decision to work outside the constitutional process I also don’t think we should muffle what the critics are saying.
To look at this situation and conclude that “the system worked” would be a huge mistake. What happened is that the system did not work, and several actors in key positions inside the system simply chose to disregard it.
