Rowland’s impeachment was a prequel to Trump’s
Impeachments used to be so special. In the first 43 years of my career, I covered two of them. John Rowland in Connecticut. Bill Clinton in Washington.
Are they going to start coming every year, like the prom and World Vegan Day? That’s inflation. They won’t be worth as much.
The Rowland impeachment process is helpful in explaining why “Trump Impeachment 2: Fire Walk With Me” is worth doing, even if conviction is unlikely.
In 2004, the Connecticut House voted to assemble a bipartisan select committee on impeachment. The committee hired counsel. It took sworn testimony. Thirteen of the witnesses who were called took the fifth. The committee subpoenaed Rowland himself. The governor tried to quash the subpoena, getting his argument fast-tracked to the state Supreme Court. The court turned him down. Three days late, Rowland resigned rather than testify.
The committee shut down without finishing its work. I don’t remember any debate about whether you can continue pre-impeaching somebody who’s out of office. I think everybody was just exhausted. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice, also pursuing Rowland, worked out a plea deal.
We wound up with mixed results in terms of a historical record. The work of the committee showed that Rowland had been more resourceful and diversified about getting money from people than had previously been understood.
The federal guilty plea included a required stipulation, signed by Rowland, admitting he had been part of a criminal conspiracy to award lucrative state contracts to people who took care of him.
Taken together, the written records of the two cases provided a rebuke to people who said — as people have, quite frequently, said over the ensuing 17 years — that the case was a hill of beans. “He got a Jacuzzi.” “This was about kitchen cabinets.”
It wasn’t. It was about the criminal mishandling of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. More piquantly, it was about an environment in which the honest businessperson — who either didn’t know about the scam or wasn’t willing to get down in the dirt — could not compete.
This is a point I have had to make over and over. You cannot be taken seriously as a conservative and make excuses for Rowland. His corruption struck at the heart of what conservatives supposedly prize — a land of unfettered opportunity for that honest businessperson.
When making the case, it has been helpful to have the official record, even if it’s not wholly complete.
That’s a lot of what we can expect to get from Trump’s second impeachment.
There will be no conviction and therefore no vote to bar him from running again.
But if he did run again, his record is clear, thanks to the dazzling work of the House Managers. In the runup to the election, he repeatedly made clear that he was cool with violence. On Jan. 6, he fired up the mob. They crashed the gates, and, by a combination of luck and quick thinking, the people inside dodged what could have been a much bigger bloodbath. This wasn’t about messing up Nancy Pelosi’s desk. This was about messing up her vital organs.
If we hit the pause button right there, Trump still has a defense: these people misunderstood his words. The violence came as an ugly shock to him.
Hit the button again and resume the playback. Once Trump knew about the destruction and danger, he did nothing to stop it. Republican Congressman Peter Meijer, a freshman from Michigan, has said it was that second speech of Jan. 6 — forever to be known as the “We love you. You’re very special” speech — that made his jaw drop.
Trump never told the rioters they were in the wrong. He continued to assert the false claims that made them so angry. He complained about “evil” being done.
If it was all a big misunderstanding, he would have told them so. He never did, because he and the hoodlums understood each other perfectly. He was out for broken glass and blood, and so were they.
The House Managers also — to an astonishing degree — understood where they were: on television. When you’re on television, you put on a TV show. Ronald Reagan might have been the last politician with a comparable grasp of that.
Thus did Wednesday become a marathon of “never seen before” video clips of the terror in the Capitol. If it all started to seem eerily familiar, consider that in 2013 Hollywood put out two different movies in which the bad guys overrun sacred Washington space: “Olympus Is Down” and “The White House Has Fallen.” The Capitol security guys rushing Mike Pence and Mitt Romney to safety were evocations of characters played by Channing Tatum and Gerard Butler.
The difference was that even Hollywood — with its prodigious imagination — failed to envision a U.S. president as anything but a potential victim worthy of our deepest concerns.
We understand new stories based on what we remember from old ones. When the Trump loyalists in the Senate let him walk away this time, they will call to mind another ugly memory: the O.J. jury. Each will be an example of a group that couldn’t execute a basic and urgently needed act of justice.
This week a man posted a video on Twitter of himself reacting to the impeachment hearings. “Thus far, they’ve been pretty entertaining,” he said. He said he was surprised that the people “saying the most egregious things, like ‘shoot Pelosi in the head,’ were women.”
It was O.J. You can’t make this stuff up.