Democrats playing risky game
TWENTY-ONE years — almost to the day — separate last week’s vote of the US House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump over the Ukraine affair and the 1998 vote that sent Bill Clinton to trial in the Senate for lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice over his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton’s impeachment was an eagerly anticipated and rare event: the only other attempt to impeach a president had ended in failure in 1868.
In contrast, the impending Trump impeachment is about as exciting as the latest outing of the Star Wars franchise — it’s a movie we’ve seen before and we already know how it will end. So novel was impeachment in 1998 that everyone was a little hazy on the procedures involved, which was fair enough as there was no one alive who could remember Andrew Johnson’s one-vote acquittal.
That’s not going to be a problem next month: turnover in America’s parliament is so slow that more than 100 members of the Congress that impeached and acquitted Clinton are making encore appearances in the Trump show. They’ll be playing different parts of course.
In 1998, the Republicans voted largely along party lines in the House, which they controlled, to impeach.
The Democrats voted on party lines in the Senate to deny the Republicans the two-thirds majority required to remove a president. Just as now, partisan political considerations played a part in the decision to impeach.
The Republicans commenced the impeachment process the month before the 1998 congressional elections in the belief that the scandal would help them at the ballot box, just as the Democrats appear to have hoped this impeachment will help them in the presidential poll next November.
It didn’t work in 1998 and it probably won’t work now.
At the polls that year, the Republicans lost seats, prompting the resignation of the Speaker, Newt Gingrich.
The Democrats appear to be making the same mistake. Since the impeachment process began, Trump’s poll ratings have improved, just as Clinton’s did in 1998.
If the public had reacted differently to the Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s trial might have ended differently, too.
Twenty-four years earlier Richard Nixon resigned when it became clear that enough Congressional Republicans, facing electoral disaster in the 1974 mid-terms, were going to vote with the Democrats to remove him from office. That’s clearly not going to happen next month because, even if some Republican Senators are worried they will pay an electoral price in November for acquitting Trump, they don’t really have a choice.
Their party’s base has become so fanatically attached to their President in the past three years that, if any of them voted to convict him, they could be certain to face a primary challenge they would struggle to fend off.
Indeed, so complete now is the Republican Party’s fealty to Trump that in speech after speech of the impeachment debate this week, its members were too scared to engage with the substance of what he is alleged to have done and instead shouted the process was “unfair”, “biased” and “divisive”, with one gent even going so far as to suggest Pontius Pilate had afforded more natural justice to Christ than the Dems were showing the President.
That was definitely a change from proceedings in 1998 when the Democrat speakers had at least acknowledged what Clinton had done was no good while arguing it didn’t meet the test of a high crime or misdemeanour, which their Constitution demands before punting the president.
The differences on this front could, of course, be explained by the well-acknowledged rise in congressional partisanship over the past two decades.
But it is hard not to suspect that the reluctance of congressional Republicans to deal with the detail can be explained by the fact there isn’t much doubt Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine until its President began a probe into Democrat Joe Biden’s son’s activities.
In Clinton’s case. the Democrats could argue that, as reprehensive as his conduct was, it was essentially a private matter. The same can’t be said about withholding military aid to an ally threatened by Russia.
The next election is going to be won by whichever side can get their voters to turn out, not by persuading the persuadable.