Election process will be wrenching

Des Moines, Iowa — The opening of the political year has collided with the end of the impeachment of President Donald Trump. The coincidence of timing, unplanned perhaps but symbolic nonetheless, points directly to what is at stake when Americans vote in November. For now, healing is not on the agenda.

Impeachment is an infrequently used tool to restrain a runaway or corrupt president. On Wednesday, Trump will become the third president to be acquitted after being impeached. No president has ever been impeached and convicted, though, of course, Richard Nixon resigned and left town to avoid such a fate.

Trump will never escape the fact of having been impeached, but he will, no doubt, see acquittal as a victory. His supporters will share in that conclusion, offended that it ever came to this. Half of the country, however, that portion of the population that has said in polls that it believes Trump should be removed from office for abusing his powers, will be at a minimum disappointed. Many will be genuinely angry.

That is the pretext for this election year. For both sides now, November will offer the only avenue to resolve the question of how long Trump remains in office and what boundaries the American people choose to set on a presidency. There is no more significant question facing voters and they are sharply divided in their views.

On Tuesday night, on the eve of the Senate’s scheduled acquittal vote, the president will deliver his State of the Union address before an evermore divided House Chamber. No matter what he says, no matter the claims he makes about himself and his accomplishments, the real state of this union at the beginning of 2020 is fraught — sour despite a good economy, distrustful of the opposition, despondent over seemingly permanent divisions, anxious about the future of democracy at this point in the country’s history. Impeachment has only intensified those feelings.

The Senate trial has done nothing to help restore public confidence. On Friday, by 51 to 49, the Senate voted against calling any witnesses to testify, preferring to push ahead to final votes. For a time, the outcome of that vote on witnesses seemed in the balance. By the time it came, only two Republicans were prepared to buck their leadership and the president.

The vote blocked an appearance by former national security adviser John Bolton — or anyone else with potentially relevant knowledge of what the president said and did in withholding military aid to Ukraine in an effort to get that country to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Bolton has made clear that he is willing to testify. Leaks of what he has written in his forthcoming book have been tantalizing, if not dispositive.

All senators swore to weigh impartial justice during the Senate trial. In the end, the GOP showed what it now means to be a member of what used to be called the Republican Party but now is simply the Party of Trump. This is not a new observation: Over the past four years, the president has remade the party into a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc.

Friday’s vote showed the value of that remaking, and the explanations provided by two

Republicans — Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose votes ultimately blocked witnesses — are telling examples of how distorted the process became.

Murkowski concluded that the impeachment process was all a failure and so there was no reason to continue it. “Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout, I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate,” she said. “I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything. It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed.”

Alexander offered a different rational for his vote. He waited until he was faced with the decision on whether to allow testimony to express real misgivings about what the president did. He concluded that the House managers had proved their case, that the president’s actions were inappropriate, but that what Trump did was not enough to warrant removal from office.

“The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate,” he said. “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.”

Most Republican senators has been unwilling even to describe what the president did as inappropriate. Instead, they have preferred to criticize House Democrats for what they say was a rushed and partisan impeachment process. By blocking witnesses, those senators have chosen to deny voters, in whose judgment they claim to be entrusting so much, additional and relevant information that might inform their decisions about whether the president deserves a second term in office.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., resisted impeachment for months and months, despite facing pressure from her liberal bloc. When the details of the president’s pressure campaign against Ukraine in pursuit of his own political interests became public last fall, she changed her position and her troops rushed to finish, pushing against an arbitrary, year-end deadline. In the end, the vote to impeach failed the test Pelosi had set out earlier, which is that, for impeachment to be successful, it should be bipartisan.

The Senate took a page from the House, deciding that a rushed process was in its interest and certainly the interest of the president, despite strong support from the public for testimony from witnesses who had relevant information and not yet been heard. They have ended up drawing no lines on presidential behavior. Trump, whose view of presidential power is extravagant, will interpret the result as he pleases.

That leaves the issue of Trump’s future — and questions about presidential powers, presidential behavior and the parameters of the Constitution — back where it always was destined to be, with the voters.

The impeachment process has left many Democrats frustrated or worse. The votes in the Senate were stacked against them. That is not the case for the election that will be held in November.

Trump starts with advantages, the normal benefits of incumbency as well as the strength of the economy. He also starts, however, with almost half the country saying it definitely will vote against him.

On Monday night, Iowa Democrats will trigger the process by which the party selects a nominee to challenge the president. Despite a year of campaigning, that choice has left countless people who want nothing more than to defeat the president almost frozen in indecision as they evaluate a field of candidates, none of whom appears a sure winner in November.

The impeachment process will soon be over, but its impact and meaning will remain to shape the choice in this election year. Because Trump is not an ordinary president, this was never to be an ordinary reelection campaign. It was always destined to be one of the most significant in the lifetimes of the voters. After impeachment, the choices for voters are all the more fundamental — and the outcome all the more consequential for the future of the country.