Donald and Robert and Chuck and Nancy: Washington will be must-see TV in 2019
If impeachment seems inevitable, Democrats may want to remember 1998
WASHINGTON — Living alongside the United States has been likened to sleeping with a twitching, grunting elephant — a political animal that’s now on the verge of a full-blown, delirious fever dream.
So strap in, Canada. To borrow a phrase from Bette Davis, it’s going to be a bumpy night.
For proof, look no further than the recent breathtaking Oval Office confrontation between Donald Trump and two people sure to be among the most painful thorns in the president’s side in 2019: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the leader of the Democratic majority that took over this week — and her Senate minority counterpart, Chuck Schumer.
In full view of a phalanx of reporters and TV cameras, they argued loudly and at length about Trump’s demand for US$5 billion in taxpayer dollars for his famous southern border wall, a condition over which the president declared he would let the U.S. government grind to a funding halt.
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country,” Trump said. “I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security.”
The new year brings a new reality to Washington, one some say Trump is just now beginning to grasp: a combative and defiant Democrat majority in the House of Representatives that will be loath to give the White House any political victories.
“This new Congress will be something different from the Congress that we have now,” Pelosi told a news conference after their meeting.
“It’ll be about transparency. It’ll be about reaching out, extending the hand of friendship to work in a bipartisan way to find common ground where we can — and stand our ground, as Thomas Jefferson said, like a rock where we can’t.”
If the Oval Office encounter was any indication, common ground will be in short supply.
The coming year will also surely be about Russia, about the ties between Vladimir Putin and Trump and his campaign, about Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and special counsel Robert Mueller and his ongoing effort to explore their myriad links — and whether, in the end, the American people elected their president under false pretences.
Depending on the outcome of that investigation, it may also about impeachment.
“Mueller is just the huge X-factor here,” said Steve Kornacki, a national political reporter for NBC News and author of “The Red and the Blue: the 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism,” which explores the gulf between Americans on each side of the Republican-Democrat divide that has been growing for 25 years.
“There’s this energy on the Democratic side to impeach Trump — obviously to investigate the hell out of him, but also to impeach him. Almost inevitably, whatever Mueller reports, it’s only going to activate that Democratic base to push for the Democratic House to act.”
Since 1998, impeachment has been a dirty word in Washington. Then, Republicans, giddy with their own congressional might and egged on by the cutthroat political ambitions of then-speaker Newt Gingrich, pushed to impeach Bill Clinton over perjury and obstruction of justice charges linked to allegations of sexual misconduct.
The effort, which Gingrich was convinced would give the Republicans 30 or 40 more House seats in that year’s midterm elections, backfired spectacularly, trimming the GOP majority by five and ultimately forcing the speaker to hand over the gavel before the year was out.
Two people who had front-row seats to that implosion? Trump’s new political nemeses, Nancy and Chuck.
Schumer became a senator in 1998, ousting a three-term Republican in New York after the Clinton impeachment debacle fired up the Democrat base. Pelosi was in the midst of a long career representing her California district in the House as she watched Gingrich — the principal architect of modern-day “red and blue” tribalist politics — go down in flames.
“Those things were formative experiences for them, and it’s obviously why both of them were so eager to keep their party from talking about impeachment on the campaign trail this year, because they feared it would fire up Republicans, it would dent Democratic prospects,” Kornacki said.
“I’m very curious to see how far that instinct extends when we start getting something more definitive back from Mueller.”
Jockeying for position before 2020 will also thicken the plot. There are believed to be upwards of two dozen Democrats with presidential aspirations; a wide-open nomination contest could make the pressure to ignore the lessons of history and pull the trigger on Trump almost impossible for Congress to resist.
“If they do decide to move,” Kornacki said, “that becomes the driving story of 2019 and 2020.”
The Democrats picked up 39 seats in this year’s mid-terms, the so-called “blue wave” that also significantly diminished the number of Republicans who weren’t necessarily big Trump supporters. In a way, that purge has given the president a bulwark against the risk of a bipartisan revolt: the Republicans who remain are more fiercely loyal.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe he has all the support he needs.
“It’s hard to impeach somebody who hasn’t done anything wrong and who’s created the greatest economy in the history of our country,” he told Reuters in an interview this week — just the latest example of a president who seems to have as much faith in his grassroots supporters as they have in him.
“I’m not concerned, no. I think that the people would revolt if that happened.”