There’s a popular misconception out there about the meaning of “self-impeaching,” one not exactly discouraged by Speaker Pelosi herself (quite the opposite). It’s that when she said of the president that he’s “almost self-impeaching,” she had in mind that she would wait for news of some particularly egregious act to break, at which point the House Democratic leadership would deploy a plan at the ready to ride the public backlash and lead the Democrats boldly into impeachment. It’s a concept akin to how FDR couldn’t convince the USA to enter WWII until imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Let’s be clear, that was not what Speaker Pelosi meant when she said “he’s self-impeaching.” What she did mean was that the president does such awful things that people would reject him and vote him out of office in 2020. Impeachment was not part of the plan. Everybody at the time who was paying close attention understood that. It two months after she announced her opposition to impeachment in a Washington Post interview.
No one who
said flatly “I’m not for impeachment” said that “he’s not worth it” said that impeachment is too “divisive” for the country said that “he’s becoming self-impeachable” said that “he’s just trying to goad us into impeachment” (remember that one?) said that he “wants to be impeached” once implied that only statutory crimes are impeachable reportedly told the House Democratic Caucus that an impeachment inquiry would mean shutting down investigations other than Judiciary's, saying “Do you want to tell Elijah Cummings to go home?” (referring to the House Ethics Committee chairman, since passed away) implied that impeachment was too much of a distraction from passing bills and promoting Democratic policies to do it at all said that impeachment would have to be widely popular for the inquiry to even start said that impeachment had to be bipartisan for the inquiry to even start then pooh-poohed the significance of then-Republican Rep. Amash coming out for impeachment implied that there had to be Senate Republicans publicly favorable to impeachment before it could even start scheduled Mueller’s testimony immediately before the month-long summer recess after the Ukraine whistleblower news broke, took a few days to finally announce the impeachment inquirywas secretly plotting to impeach. Look no further than this article, which was consistent with other reporting:
Push to impeach Trump stalls amid Democrats’ deference to — and fear of — Pelosi, by Rachael Bade, Washington Post, June 16, 2019
The Democratic leadership’s strategy was to pass messaging bills on a portfolio of policies that the Republican Senate would blow off but that Democrats could campaign on in 2020, to work with the president (even though he’s a fascist) to pass things like an infrastructure bill so that they could be seen as “getting things done in a bipartisan way” (helping a fascist make the trucks run on time*), and to take impeachment off the table so as not to appear “obstructionist” or to “distract” from “kitchen table issues.” It wasn’t any kind of secret. Speaker Pelosi told us herself: the idea was to win so big in 2020 that Donald couldn’t question it (good luck with stopping him from doing that).
Not for nothing, and I say this as a long-time impeachment advocate, for about two months after Speaker Pelosi’s Washington Post interview it was nearly impossible to bring up impeachment in mainstream Democratic activist circles. People would get mad. They were clearly following Speaker Pelosi’s lead. It was so bad that even some staunch impeachment advocates were thinking about giving up. And it didn’t have to be that way. As I found out with a question I posed here on Daily Kos and with in-person conversations, had Speaker Pelosi instead come out in favor of impeachment back then, I think that most of the Democratic electorate would have supported that position. The idea that Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Hoyer, and other leading Democrats were working away behind the scenes to prepare the country for the impeachment process that we have today is plainly ludicrous.
So why bring this up now, as the House moves to impeach over the Ukraine affair?
Because the same priorities and politics that drove the Democratic House leadership’s attempt to not impeach in the first place are also driving their decision, once not impeaching became politically untenable, to impeach narrowly on the Ukraine affair and not on the full range of the administration’s catastrophically harmful abuses of power.
Both decisions are morally, politically, strategically, and logically unsupported, from a perspective of seeking justice and of doing the most possible to turn back fascism. Congresspeople’s oaths aren’t to just the parts of the Constitution that cover the offenses in the Ukraine affair, they’re to the whole Constitution. “High crimes and misdemeanors” include abuses of power, malign neglect of responsibility, gross incompetence, and other serious offenses that stem from the power and responsibility of the office of the president. Those are obligations that the public is supposed to have bestowed upon government officials through our social contract, the Constitution—all of it, not selective parts of it—if the government is to be legitimate. Those obligations are not optional. That goes for the president and other executive branch officials in their duties, and that also goes for congresspeople, including their duty to impeach.
To not impeach over offenses other than the Ukraine affair, from the obstruction of justice regarding Mueller’s Department of Justice investigation into 2016 Russian election interference, to menacing and threatening political opponents and the press, to everything else, would tend to indicate that the Democratic Party as the loyal opposition, that the House of Representatives as the legislative body closest to the people, fundamentally finds those acts acceptable in the normal course of politics. Soon after announcing the impeachment inquiry on the Ukraine affair, Speaker Pelosi said (0:23:38-0:25:00):
We will take the course of integrity, of deliberation, of fairness, as I think we have done all along by not just responding to people who thought he should be impeached. Which takes me to another subject: if you have a concern about the president in terms of the cost of prescription drugs, or not building the infrastructure, or tax cuts for the rich, or cowardice when it comes to gun violence prevention, or cruelty to children and LGBTQ, or whatever… denial about whether there’s climate change… work on that in the election. That’s not about impeachment. That’s about differences of opinion and policy that are about elections. But this is about the facts of the acts that took place and the Constitution of the United States.
(Notably, after then mentioning that Chairman Schiff “has this under control,” Pelosi immediately pivoted to H.R.3, a signature bill for prescription drug policy.) Note that “cruelty to children” includes acts, in contravention of law and/or treaty, of violating immigrants’ rights to seek asylum and to other immigration procedures, of holding children separately from their guardians and not keeping records of guardianship, of effectively orphaning them and giving them to foster parents, of holding them longer than allowed by the court-ordered Flores agreement, of torturing them, of denying them medical treatment and other necessities of life, and of several deaths in detention. Note that “cruelty to LGBTQ [people]” includes taking away their federal benefits and protections against discrimination as well as actively discriminating against transgender people in the military.
Taken together, these acts are more than impeachable, and to dismiss them as politics as usual is, if a grim statement of the state of politics in America today, nonetheless horrifying and wrong. Even climate denial and environmental destruction can be impeachable, considering the admonition in the Constitution’s Preamble to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”—if Congress wants it to be.**
House Intelligence Chairman Schiff said last week, upon Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler’s announcement of the two articles of impeachment on the Ukraine affair (07:58-08:13):
We stand here today because the President’s continuing abuse of his power has left us no choice. To do nothing would make ourselves complicit in the President’s abuse of his high office, the public trust, and our national security.
That same argument applies to every other impeachable act that the president—as well as many other administration officials—has committed.
Impeachment is not solely a matter of congresspeople fulfilling their oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution, nor of basic accountability, nor of morality. It is also a matter of whether we fight fascism and win back democracy or whether, out of uncertainty, risk-aversion, outwitting ourselves, or passivity, we risk losing it all. If the House does a narow impeachment and leaves the Senate the political space to too readily acquit, and if there is not even a prospect of further impeachment with potential for conviction and removal, then as Rep. Al Green and others have warned, the president would be unbound by any law or check and would realize the power of a foul king.
I don’t believe that restricting impeachment to Ukraine has the benefit of keeping it “simple” and easy for the public to understand and support. It muddies the message to say that this one thing is bad and the rest are not great but okay. It disregards the suffering of the multitudes of people who the administration has wronged and is harming now and for the foreseeable future.
No, to impeach on everything illuminates the pattern of anti-democratic tyranny. It sets the standard that now we really do insist, consequentially and not just rhetorically, that “no one is above the law.” People won’t tire of impeachment or of the Democrats, people will tire of the endless train of this Republican administration’s monstrous crimes of office, as televised House hearing after hearing breaks through the corporate media barrier. Let us broaden the relevance of impeachment to all those affected, righteously rally their support for comprehensive justice, and carry that political wave into the Senate trial to secure conviction and removal.
No option has been foreclosed. Congress can expand the impeachment inquiry, hold prosecutorial public hearings, and vote to impeach on more articles, whether they pass the articles on the Ukraine affair now or later. And according to the House rules, any member of Congress can force a floor vote on an article of impeachment at any time (a process that Rep. Green has used to good effect).
Please call your congressperson’s DC office today and ask him or her to expand the articles of impeachment. You can ask for support of an activist coalition set of six draft articles, presented by Free Speech for People. You can mention a charge or two that you think are most important. You can support other organizations’ draft articles (see below) or offer your own.
See what activists are up to with #ImpeachForThePeople. For a dramatized portrayal of what an expanded impeachment could look like, see last week’s post:
It's not too late to #ExpandTheArticles. A model impeachment hearing shows how! (video)
If you are inspired to do even more, beyond going to a Nobody Is Above the Law rally today, Indivisible is running an action to call people in critical senators' states, so that we can get constituents to demand that their senators conduct a fair trial. If you haven’t already, join a local activist group like your nearest Indivisible chapter, and join the national impeachment action group By the People.
Public pressure for impeachment helped get it started when it seemed politically impossible. Now let’s take the next step and set the conditions to make conviction and removal inevitable. Let’s make impeachment itself a vehicle to rebuild democracy.
Draft articles of impeachment:
#ImpeachForThePeople coalition, Impeachment for the People— supported by By the People, CREDO Action, Free Speech For People, Courage Campaign, Democracy For America, Equal Justice Society, Mainers for Accountable Leadership, March For Truth, Movement School, Presente, Progressive Democrats of America, Revolving Door Project, and Women’s March Roots Action, Trump Articles of Impeachment— extensive! Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, H.Res.396— includes the prez’s white supremacism, attacks on the free press, and more Free Speech for People, The Legal Case for a Congressional Investigation on Whether to Impeach President Donald J. Trump— formal articles, and there’s more about abuse of emergency powers, the Ukraine scandal, and racism and bigotry The Impeachment Project, Resolution to Authorize Impeachment Hearings and our Articles of Impeachment— I think it’s a related effort Need to Impeach, Trump’s 10 Impeachable Offenses— Steyer’s former group, pretty good list Liberal Thinking’s Articles of Impeachment here on Daily KosEnd notes
* These fascists don’t even like trains!
** That is not to say that I’m calling Speaker Pelosi naive or to say that the many commentators who, like me, advocate a comprehensive impeachment are somehow more insightful than her. Not in the slightest. It’s that the priorities are different.
It’s hard to know for sure what those priorities are, but from what I have seen in politics, and not specific only to impeachment, of course equality, democracy, and justice are priorities. It’s just that when push comes to shove they don’t seem to be the congressional leadership’s highest ones. They’re nice rhetorical goals, and we advance them in fits and starts. But often it seems that maintaining neoliberal† capitalist empire, quashing any nascent populist social democratic ideological advances, avoiding direct material challenges to white supremacism that could anger the once-”silent majority,” and avoiding overly upsetting oligarchs take precedence. To impeach over racist offenses like torturing and orphaning immigrants or like leaving the American citizens of Puerto Rico to suffer and die after a hurricane is to impeach America’s white supremacism. To impeach over the president’s nepotism and financial self-dealing is to impeach much of our oligarchical class. For congressional Democrats to aggressively wield the legitimate authority of the legislature, against some rich white men and on the public’s behalf, would set expectations that our politicians could keep doing that. It would give people ideas.
It’s a feasible theory of politics that to maintain the existing power structure and to make only tangential policy adjustments to ameliorate oppression is what it takes to avoid raising the unbearable ire of amoral, powerful oligarchs, racists, anti-socialists. That, for example, getting some attenuation of systematic health care gouging and getting more diversity and equity in hiring at large corporations is the best we can hope for for the foreseeable future. It’s apparently the theory that the Democratic Party leadership has operated under since the 1970s. Leading House Democrats’ rather baroque professions of their reluctance to impeach and sadness about impeaching appear to fit that mold, as if they’re speaking not to us but to oligarchs and “soft” racists who don’t take kindly to democratic assertions of authority.
I’m in favor of a different theory of politics, one that is more honest, direct, confrontational, moral, and I think appealing and effective. One more in line with that practiced by politicians like FDR, Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. One that can reach millions of currently disaffected people and build a participatory democratic culture.
† My definition of “neoliberal” is the ideology that any policy not involving some fat cat somewhere sponging cash off the rest of us is somehow immoral.