To Impeach or Not to Impeach?

As the month of September concluded, the troubles plaguing Donald J. Trump’s administration only swelled. It appears as if the President has been enlisting the help of foreign leaders such as the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on his political opponents. With this, the calls for impeachment proceedings have become even more vociferous. Democratic members of the House of Representatives officially decided to open an Impeachment inquiry on the 24^th of September, after months of reluctance to tread that path.

This reluctance stemmed from a fear that impeachment proceedings would fail in their objective and instead draw in greater sympathy and support for the President. However, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House has now stated that the severity of Donald Trump’s contempt for constitutional norms leaves them with no other choice. But how can a sitting US President be removed from office and is it wise for the Democrats to do so?

The Constitutional Process

The Constitution of the USA declares that a sitting President can be removed for ‘treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours’. While that does remain rather open-ended, it does allow for the president to be impeached even if they have not broken a specific law. Political commentators believe that Trump’s engagement with the Ukrainian president is an impeachable offense. Impeachment actually only refers to the process by which the House brings about an indictment against a President, officially holding them responsible for acts that merit removal.

Traditionally, the House Judiciary Committee, a group of 41 representatives from both parties investigates possible impeachable offenses but the Democratic Party can vote to create a different committee for that task. The 435 members of the House can then initiate ‘articles of impeachment’ by simple majority and the trial then moves to the Senate where a 2/3 majority in favour of impeachment can remove the President.

Political Hesitance

It is in the Senate that the Democrats may end up losing the vote. Every single Democrat, the singular independent and 20 of the 53 Republican senators would have to vote for removal for it to succeed. But the Democrats have been hesitant to bring this about for months. Among other factors, their reticence stemmed from what they considered was inevitable defeat in the US Senate as virtually no Republican senator currently appears likely to vote with the Democrats.

They also feared that impeachment would exacerbate the polarisation between the Democrat and Republican voter bases. Already the narratives around any action taken by this administration or by the Democrats become highly charged. Each party’s supporters extoll their party’s virtues and viciously decry the opponent. In particular, Trump voters have taken to the rhetoric that he used to lambast his opponents, rhetoric that is often viewed as insulting to the office. Only in July did he insist that four Democratic first-time congresswomen ‘go back home’, labelling them unfaithful to America. Such an atmosphere may not have been conducive to impeachment proceedings. They feared that it may add fuel to Trump’s narratives of victimhood where he claims that the Democrats are out to remove him for their own nefarious ends. This may increase the support he holds and hence strengthen his campaign for re-election in 2020.

However, more pressing than this was the plan led by Pelosi to implement long term policy proposals and defeat Trump in 2020. She believed that pushing Democratic members of Congress to take the extremely controversial stance of impeachment could threaten their seats within the House, especially the seats in pro-Trump districts, where Democrats won by narrow margins in the 2018 elections. This would have deprived them of a hard-fought House majority, inhibiting their plans to pass legislation.

Many Democrats sought to wait for more conclusive reasons to move towards impeachment and hence awaited eagerly the result of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s alleged enlisting of Russian assistance in the 2016 elections. Mueller’s report stated that they did not find adequate evidence that the campaign coordinated with Russia but attributed this to lack of evidence and testimony. The report did not exonerate Donald Trump despite his Tweets about ‘total exoneration’ and Mueller stated that by law he could not indict a sitting President.

Democratic Mobilisation

With that the ball was in the court of the Democrats. Now with a multitude of its members pushing for impeachment, including all those running in the Democratic primary race, Pelosi and co. have begun making calls and having caucus meetings over their strategy. They are buoyed by the fact that Donald Trump’s approval rating is at 41.5% only and that YouGov polls taken after the Ukraine revelations suggest 47% of Americans support impeachment. And impeachment proceedings will bring to the fore the most powerful argument that they may be running in the 2020 election: that Trump is corrupt, incompetent and entirely unfit for office. It would be wiser for them to exhibit that they are standing by this claim and believe his actions to merit removal. Prominent Democrats like Kamala Harris have deemed it a constitutional necessity. It may draw in voters who have been pushing for impeachment and unite the party on a single goal.

Certainly, Mike Pence is not an ideal replacement. But the sheer contempt for the law that Trump has exhibited appears unprecedented and provides dangerous precedents for the future. And the Democrats may even be able to unite the country better by convincing the citizenry of the nature of Trump’s ‘crimes and misdemeanours’. No president in US history has been impeached. Bill Clinton and Andrew Jackson were exonerated by the Senate, and Richard Nixon resigned before his inevitable ouster. If Trump were to become the first, then it could prove to be an incredible success for the Democrats and potentially propel them to the White House and a solid Congressional majority in 2020.

*Image credits go to Reuters/Handout*