Why impeachment is a waste of time

Like many others, I held out hope that some Republicans would vote to impeach and convict Donald Trump over the Ukraine scandal. Surely this was worse than Watergate: One was a domestic break-in; the other involved a foreign power.

I was, of course, disappointed.

I suspect I’ll be disappointed again at Trump’s second impeachment trial. This isn’t 1974 anymore. Richard Nixon resigned because members of his own party warned him he’d be impeached; today, members of Trump’s own party are defending him after an assault on the Capitol.

Impeachment was a heavy lift in 1974. Republicans didn’t support it until very late in the game, because they didn’t want to go against their guy. He might have been a sonofabitch, but he was their sonofabitch.

Same goes for Trump, except now our nation is so polarized that a Senate conviction is a pipe dream.

Here’s why.

Political process

You always hear that impeachment and the Senate trial that comes afterward aren’t judicial proceedings, they’re political exercises.

All the talk of weighing the facts and “voting your conscience” is just a façade. Underneath it all, most members of Congress vote in their own best interests, not the country’s, and mostly, that means supporting the home team.

The phenomenon was on full display during Trump’s first impeachment and trial, when just one Republican (Mitt Romney) voted to convict the then-president on one of the two counts presented.

It was easy enough to rationalize defending Trump, at least from a political perspective. Ukraine is a nation most people couldn’t find on a map and fewer people care about. Trump had asked that Ukraine’s president announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son as an implied condition for receiving U.S. military aid. But who cared? It didn’t affect Americans’ everyday lives, so what did it matter?

And if their constituents didn’t care, why should the people who represented them? In fact, they saw it as a golden opportunity to fire up voters in their deep-red, gerrymandered districts about Democrats’ partisan “witch hunt” against their dear leader.

Close to home

But what was perhaps most surprising was Republicans’ willingness to follow the same strategy after Trump incited a mob of white nationalists to storm the Capitol and put these same lawmakers in danger. Only 10 Republicans voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection, even though none of the terrorists would’ve even been there without his invitation, and he directly told them to head over to the Capitol and “fight” against those lawmakers who had opposed him.

Is their collective memory really that short? Or did they think they were safe all along, and that the insurrectionists only wanted to get their hands on Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Or did they do a quick political calculation and conclude that they’d be better off rationalizing Trump’s actions than condemning them? Considering their past behavior — including in the first impeachment process — this was most likely top of mind for them. They’d repeatedly put political survival ahead of principle, even when the principles in question were long-held Republican ideals they had run on.

Conflict of interest

None of this should be surprising, considering the inherent conflict of interest involved in any presidential impeachment.

When the framers wrote the Constitution, they wrote it for a united country. There were no political parties, and the founders didn’t want them. So they wrote the Constitution based on the assumption that there wouldn’t be any. They didn’t foresee partisan conflicts of interest in an impeachment process because partisanship didn’t exist.

Now that it does, however, you’ve got the most egregious conflict of interest imaginable, short of a gun to the head: Members are being asked to vote against the leader of their own party, the person in many ways synonymous with the party itself. To vote for impeachment is, in a sense, to indict themselves for following such a leader in the first place. It’s a vote against their own identity, and that’s too much to ask for most, even without gerrymandering and constituent demands.

Waste of time?

Is impeachment in a partisan system even viable? Can it ever be credible?

Unfortunately, I keep coming up with the same answer: It’s not. A judicial proceeding — any judicial proceeding, including impeachment — only works if the goal is impartiality. “Blind justice,” as they say. It doesn’t work in a partisan environment, because the result will always be dismissed regardless of the outcome. Whichever side loses will say it’s all just political and claim they’ve been victims of a “witch hunt.”

Sound familiar?

And it is a partisan process. It’s kind of like college football: Everyone knows it’s about business — raking in millions of dollars in merchandising, TV revenue, etc. — not education, but everyone still pretends it has something to do with academics. Athletes who compete for universities know this, and they (naturally) want to get paid. They want the schools to stop pretending.

So what if Congress stopped the masquerade?

Kangaroo court

What if they treated impeachment like the political process it is, rather than pretending it’s an actual trial? The entire system is run on a basis of give and take, so why should impeachment be any different? You could treat it like any proposal, subject to political bargaining.

Does it sound like nothing more than base transactional politics? You scratch my back, I scratch yours? Exactly the kind of quid pro quo that Trump engages in all the time (as he did with the Ukrainian leader)? It’s really no wonder that he wasn’t too concerned about impeachment, and that he was able to play the system so he got away with everything under the sun.

Do you find it offensive that I would apply this system to impeachment, which is supposed to involve guilt and innocence, not political deal-making?

Good. So do I.

But this is where we are: We have a choice of putting false hope in a system that wasn’t designed for partisan politics and legislators who weren’t built for integrity (at least, not most of them), or we can call it what it is: political.

False premise

The entire impeachment process is built on a false premise: that politicians are fit to judge their own. It may have worked in theory in 1787, but it doesn’t work in theory or in practice now.

Using a partisan grand jury and a partisan panel of political jurists to decide the fate of a sitting president (or any other partisan figure) is about as sensible as allowing members of Congress to redraw their own districts. When you trust the foxes to guard the henhouse, you shouldn’t be surprised if all your eggs have been broken and the chickens have been butchered.

It’s past time to put the fate of presidents who break their oath of office squarely where it belongs: in the judicial branch. But we’ve lacked the courage to do it for the past two centuries, so I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime. In fact, I expect the system to implode before we finally admit it’s broken.

Call me selfish, but I hope that doesn’t happen in my lifetime, either.

Stephen H. Provost is a former journalist and author of three books about the Trump presidency, available on Amazon at www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RC7L8X1.