Impeach Rosenstein? C’mon, man

While Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is surely disheartened to have had five articles of impeachment filed against him by a clutch of congressional Republicans, he should not take the move personally.

Although Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio, the current and former chairmen of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who are leading this crusade, are running around Washington loudly accusing Rosenstein of high crimes and misdemeanors, their public relations assault is not actually about his refusing to turn over this or that document related to the Russia investigation. It’s not really even about the lawmakers’ loathing of the broader investigation, though certainly President Donald Trump’s congressional lackeys — Meadows and Jordan most definitely included — are increasingly desperate to derail it.

For Freedom Caucus leaders, this impeachment resolution is about something at once much broader and far pettier: the need to make a huge, disruptive, polarizing political stink just as members head home for the long hot August recess. Especially with a critical midterm election coming, it never hurts to have some extra well-marbled meat to throw the voters. And it is unlikely a coincidence that, less than 24 hours after filing, Jordan — who, lest anyone forget, is multiply accused of overlooking rampant sexual abuse while an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University — formally announced his candidacy for House speaker.

Not to make Rosenstein feel any less special, but this is the fourth year in a row that Freedom Caucusers have pulled a summer-break stunt so nakedly self-serving that it would be comical if it weren’t so odious in its quest to erode public faith in government and in democratic institutions more broadly. Indeed, for all those wondering how the Republican Party reached the point where Trump could swallow it whole with his furious everything-is-awful-and-everyone-isout-to-get-you brand of demagogy, look no further than the nihilists in the Freedom Caucus.

First, a brief recap of Meadows & Co.’s

It’s not that the Freedom Caucus members don’t recognize the damage they’re doing — or even that they don’t care. It is that delegitimizing government is at the heart of their movement.

previous summer shenanigans: In 2015, Meadows became an overnight political celebrity when, on the day before break, he filed a motion aimed at overthrowing the House speaker, John Boehner. That effort eventually bore fruit.

The next two, not so much. In 2016, Freedom Caucus members filed a pre-break motion to force a vote on the impeachment of the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, John Koskinen. (Impeachment is all the rage with these guys.) And last summer, they filed a discharge petition demanding a vote on a repeal of Obamacare.

This year’s push to impeach Rosenstein is about as likely to succeed as a campaign to make Roseanne Barr the next head of the NA ACP. Besides Jordan and Meadows, it has only nine co-sponsors, and Republican leaders, including Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the oversight committee, have expressed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the effort. Meadows didn’t even attempt to file a “privileged motion,” as he and his colleagues did against Koskinen two years ago, which would have forced a vote before members decamped last Thursday.

As such, the issue won’t get taken up until lawmakers return from break in September, if then. (That’s the beauty of pre-recess antics: They cannot fail before members get to spend several weeks touting them back home.) At that point, there will be only a handful of weeks remaining until Election Day. There is vanishingly little chance that House leadership will let this toxic nonsense advance — Speaker Paul Ryan already has publicly smacked down the effort — and zero chance that the motion could amass anywhere close to the two-thirds support required for the Senate to actually remove Rosenstein.

This stunt is in fact so ridiculous, so unfounded, so poisonous to the republic that Attorney General Jeff Sessions felt compelled not only to publicly defend his deputy, but also to suggest that the lawmakers involved find a better use of their time. And Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who was fired in January 2017 for refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban, tweeted a warning about the long-term damage of “using the Department of Justice as a prop for political theater.”

Yates is right to be concerned. It’s not that the Freedom Caucus members don’t recognize the damage they’re doing — or even that they don’t care. It is that delegitimizing government is at the heart of their movement. These backbench bomb-throwers came to power on an explicit promise to stop President Barack Obama from achieving his goals and, as a bonus, to punish any Republican lawmaker showing even the slightest inclination to cooperate with the opposition. Conflict and obstructionism have always been their purpose, fueled by their relentless message that government is always the problem, that all experts are idiots, that cultural and coastal elites hate “real” Americans and that all of Washington is corrupt and broken beyond repair. Except themselves, of course.

As has often been noted, Trump did not invent the apocalyptic message that he has used to dazzle the Republican base. He merely distilled it to its essence. But the base had been groomed for his arrival for years, in no small part by lawmakers like Meadows and Jordan, who have repeatedly proved eager to tear down democratic institutions in the service of their own political aims.

So while the Freedom Caucus’ pitiful effort to oust Rosenstein should not be taken seriously on practical grounds, it is a tragic reminder of the bleak path down which the Republican Party has been slouching in recent years. The rot was there long before Trump showed up to exploit it, and it is likely to remain long after he is gone.