I enjoyed the dueling articles by Michael Brendan Dougherty and Ramesh Ponnuru on whether President Trump should have been impeached. Ramesh says yes, Michael no.
If I’m reading him right, Michael agrees with Ramesh that Trump is an example of a president who “uses his office to encourage foreign governments to investigate his political opponents” (I’m quoting Ramesh) and that this is an impeachable offense. In thinking this they both depart from NR’s editorial, which, if I’m reading it right, holds that Trump’s conduct, though wrong, is not impeachable.
Where they disagree is that Ramesh thinks it would be prudent to impeach Trump, while Michael does not. “Is the primary effect of impeaching President Trump,” Michael asks, “to reestablish and enhance the operation of our Constitution and remedy his abuse of power? I wonder. Ponnuru’s case for Trump’s impeachment makes sense on its own terms, relating solely to Trump. But being a human being who remembers many other presidential offenses in his lifetime, I’m puzzled.” Michael goes on to mention President Reagan’s defiance of the Boland Amendment, President Clinton’s Lincoln Bedroom scandal, President Obama’s military intervention in Libya, and presidential abuses of war powers during the Vietnam era. He then argues that, in light of these other examples, Trump’s impeachment appears to be selective and motivated more by an implacable disgust toward the president than by the true gravity of his offense, and that the impeachment is “aimed at restoring a Washington consensus way of doing things, a Washington culture, that has been indefensible for decades.”
I understand how one might reach this conclusion. But I agree with Ramesh. Here’s why, in three steps or none:
First, I think Michael neglects the import of this sentence from Ramesh: “The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal to protect us from officials, including presidents, who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between the common good that government is supposed to serve and their own narrow interests.” I think this way of describing Trump’s offense establishes a coherent distinction between his conduct and the examples Michael gives. Some of those examples (Reagan, Obama, Vietnam) I’d call cases of “ideological corruption” — that is, cases in which a president disregarded the Constitution or the will of Congress for the sake of what he took, rightly or wrongly, but in any case ideologically, to be the common good. Another example (Clinton), I’d call “personal corruption”: It was unseemly to raise campaign funds by, in effect, renting part of the White House as a high-end hotel, but it did not touch on any affairs of state and is not generally held to have violated the law.
But in Trump we seem to have a president willing to subordinate the authority of signed legislation — concerning, in this case, the foreign and defense interests of the United States — to “[his] own narrow interests.” Let’s call this a case of “official corruption.” (I say only that it “seems” to be such a case because the Senate trial has not taken place yet and I am not a senator. Let’s grant that there’s an argument that Trump might have “sincerely believed he was about to unravel some kind of vast conspiracy involving the Bidens,” as Rich has put it, and that if such a conspiracy had existed, it would have served the common good to unravel it. I won’t go into this beyond saying that I don’t find it to be the most plausible interpretation of Trump’s conduct. Let’s also note that official corruption is not necessarily a sign of an evil character. The distinction between personal and official interests is, if not unique to public life, accentuated and uniquely important in it, and the correct standards for running one’s own business are presumably different.)
Second, while I can’t know for sure, I believe that the precedent of impeaching a president for official corruption would be reasonably likely to be observed in future cases, because it would have no intrinsic connection to ideology and so none to “the demon of faction” (Hamilton, Federalist 65). To think that Obama or Reagan should have been impeached for possible acts of ideological corruption, you have to have a certain view of the legitimate powers of the presidency and their relation to those of Congress. That view might be a correct reading of the Constitution, but much of the country might ideologically oppose the Constitution. To think that Trump should be impeached for a possible act of official corruption requires no more than the recognition that official duties, whatever they be, must not be subordinated to personal interests, whatever they be. I have little doubt that a Republican House would impeach a future Democratic president for offenses similar to Trump’s, or that the Republican House would have impeached President Obama if he had tried to delay the delivery of military aid to some nation unless its government had tried to embarrass Mitt Romney. Perhaps a Republican Congress would impeach officials of the Obama administration for abuses of surveillance powers in the 2016 election if those officials still held their posts. (This would strike me as an intermediate or hybrid case, perhaps, if I thought of the victory of an official’s preferred candidate as both a personal and an ideological interest of the official.) Both parties will of course be more reluctant to impeach their own, but I think neither more so than the other.
Third, while I think that ideological corruption is grave, and that personal corruption can be, particularly if it involves the commission of felonies, in which case the president has undermined the rule of law in a weighty way, I don’t think that our tendency to put up with either or both negates the value of discouraging official corruption. I’d like to discourage all three; if we can’t, I’d like to discourage any. I also do not think it matters whether some supporters of impeachment happen to be motivated by personal animus toward the president, any more than it was a defense of Al Capone’s tax evasion (to take another of Michael’s examples) that the government really wanted to try him for murder, or than it would have been if Eliot Ness and his colleagues had been moved wholly by distaste for Capone’s personality. What matters is the objective standard, not the subjective motivation for its establishment. Perhaps the reason the Mueller report did not trigger impeachment hearings, despite the Democrats’ odium for Trump, is that it did not offer plausible objective grounds for holding them. Faction is forever but objectivity claims the persuadable margin.
We could also throw out all these distinctions and just say that our failure to impeach presidents for impeachable offenses past is not a good reason to hold them to low standards forever. Sometimes it is better to keep things simple and do what seems right in the immediate case rather than evaluate every issue in the light of every other issue and then refract the whole thing through partisan affiliation, ideological belief, broad condemnations of establishments or cultures, or anything else.
Two more thoughts (let’s start the counting over) that are not related to what Michael and Ramesh wrote:
First, one defense of Trump I’ve heard is that the military aid was after all delivered to Ukraine, the government of Ukraine did not announce an investigation of Burisma and the Bidens, and there were no consequences. This does not persuade me. Trump’s apparent willingness to act in an officially corrupt manner raises the possibility of future consequences. And I think that official corruption is intolerable regardless of its direct consequences, since it cannot avoid damaging a culture of political probity or, once tolerated, reducing our expectations of it.
Second, I am not persuaded by arguments that Congress, in impeaching and removing Trump, would be circumventing voter will and that this would be especially bad when a presidential election is less than a year away. Removal is by definition a circumvention of voter will. If you object to that, you object to the Constitution, which places the impeachment and removal powers with the Congress, not with the voters, and which does not establish any procedure for the voters to recall a president between elections, but which does establish procedures for you to amend it. As for the timing, if an act of official corruption amounts to inviting foreign interference in an election, then it cannot be generally true that the desirability or permissibility of impeachment decreases as the election approaches, since the integrity of the election is in doubt. It might be true that the threat to its integrity has been exposed this time, and that there will be no further such incidents, but the truth of the latter claim cannot be known, and the argument as usually made is too categorical.