Impeachment day in AZ: The partisan divide but some hope for the future

As the U.S. House of Representatives neared its historic vote to impeach a president of the United States for only the third time in U.S. history Wednesday, the view from Arizona was much like the view from the rest of America, which is to say that it depended entirely on where you sat.

Matt Salmon watched the proceedings from the seat of a college professor, but also through the lens of a two-time congressman. He had voted to impeach another president more than 20 years earlier, and could see a straight line from that day to Wednesday.

The roles were reversed, but the dynamics were the same. A nation that felt hopelessly divided over what had been done wrong, where all disagreements suddenly felt personal. A House controlled by one party impeached a president who had galvanized the other party.

And though there has yet to be a Senate trial in the case of President Donald Trump, the outcome in the latest impeachment seems likely to be the same — an acquittal in the upper chamber with no universal agreement on who was right.

“It just turned out to be very partisan,” said Salmon, who now teaches classes in government and politics at Arizona State University. He didn’t see the impeachment of Bill Clinton as a singular event, but as one in a long sequence leading directly to Donald Trump.

“Shortly after that, we had Bush v. Gore,” he said, “and a combination of things that led us to where we are today.”

Salmon, a lifelong Republican, said he doesn’t like to comment on the current proceedings, but he said his vote to impeach President Bill Clinton came after special prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation revealed “numerous felonies.”

Today, Republicans contend that the proceedings against Trump don’t have that kind of substance, that no true crimes are alleged, while Democrats push the narrative that Trump abused his powers as president and obstructed Congress in its investigation.

(And it bears noting, when Salmon decided to leave his seat, he was replaced by fellow Republican Andy Biggs, who led House Republicans on Wednesday as they tried to adjourn the proceedings against Trump. “So we can stop wasting America’s time,” Biggs said. The effort failed.)

In 2019, as in so many recent years, both parties seemed to move, each in their own virtual lockstep, toward the inevitable.

There is no Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes, two vaunted members of the Republican leadership (both from Arizona), to tell Richard Nixon that he could not survive an impeachment vote, which forced his resignation.

And there are precious few on either side of the aisle who are willing to buck their parties the way John McCain often did.

McCain, the former Republican presidential nominee, died at his home in Arizona last year, but his ghost has continued to hang over the Trump presidency and the impeachment hearings in ways real and symbolic.

Before he died, McCain seemed to relish his informal role as Trump’s antagonist in chief — sparring with him on Twitter, delivering the epic thumbsdown vote against a Trump-led move to repeal the Affordable Care Act, then delivering a soaring final speech that blasted everything from rank partisanship to the border wall. “We are not the president’s subordinates,” McCain declared. “We are his equal!”

McCain’s name was even curiously threaded through the evidence in the form of former ambassador Kurt Volker, who recently stepped down from the foreign policy think tank that bears McCain’s name. Volker had emerged as one of the central figures in the Ukraine drama that touched off the impeachment investigation.

McCain’s pleas for bipartisan cooperation aside, the division in Washington reflects the divide back home in Arizona. The state gave birth to Goldwater, the godfather of the American conservative movement. It has trended purple in recent years.

But its technical role in impeachment might not have changed quite so much.

On Wednesday in Arizona’s House delegation, five Democrats voted to impeach and four Republicans voted no. The vote was on party lines. Just as it was in 1998.

From where Steve Slaton sat, in reliably red Show Low in Arizona’s White Mountains, the impeachment was generating big business.

By the time his store — the Trump Store — and its adjoining coffee house opened, the House was already three hours into its historic debate.

Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado had already assumed the gavel as speaker pro-tem.

Trump himself had already tweeted his displeasure at the whole affair and made it known that later that night he would soon be headed to Michigan, a state he narrowly wrested from Hillary Clinton in 2016, to stage a Keep America Great Rally. (It was held in the heart of the district represented by Rep. Justin Amash, one of the few defectors from the GOP fold.)

And the Trump Store’s clientele was fired up.

“It’s been nonstop all day,” said Slaton, who, with his wife, Karen, has run the Trump Store for about three years.

“It’s been a phenomenal day,” Slaton said, with the TV tuned as always to the One America News Network’s coverage of the impeachment in the background. “People are really angry.”

The Trump Store sits on Deuce of Clubs Avenue, which like the town itself got its name when two ranchers settled a feud with a game of cards. The winnertake-all bet was to be settled by whoever drew the lowest card, and the two of clubs won.

The town of 10,000 has gone Republican in each of the last five presidential elections, twice by margins of 10 percent or more.

But it sits in Navajo County, which has more of a purplish tinge, which is to say it’s a bit like Arizona as a whole.

From where Rebecca McHood sat, behind the wheel of her Toyota Prius on the way to school with her 11-year-old twins, the hearings on the car radio were just one more signal that things have to change.

McHood, a stay-at-home mom in suburban Gilbert and a self-described activist, says she had always considered herself a “Barbara Bush Republican” but now is adamant that Trump must go.

She says she has been dealing with a lot of “complex emotions” after her mother’s death recently, but that she has been actively following the impeachment process and making signs for Tuesday night’s protests at political offices around the Valley.

Her daughters are used to her activism. She’s taken them to rallies against the Dakota pipeline and in support of Muslims affected by Trump’s proposed travel ban.

The fact that the allegations against Trump involve using a foreign power to influence American elections hits home.

“Elections are something that are very sacred to me,” she said.

She applauds Democrats who have come out in favor of impeachment, like Arizona’s Greg Stanton, saying she sees them as “protecting the Constitution.”

“It’s ironic, but it’s almost like the 1960s when the roles of Democrats and Republicans sort of switched. It used to be that the Republicans prided themselves on protecting the Constitution, but now they’re just putting on a show to to see who can impress (Trump).”

While she followed the committee hearings leading up to the proceedings intensely, she said she spent the rest of Wednesday checking in only sporadically on C-Span.

“I’m proud of the Democrats who are taking the sacred trust of their office seriously,” she said.

She added that she laments that the days are over when McCain and fellow Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl could work on an issue like immigration and still maintain the respect of colleagues who disagreed with them.

Across the Valley, the view from where Joe Hutchinson sat in his Glendale kitchen was one of Democrats shredding the Constitution.

The semi-retired salesman started listening to the hearings on the radio before he had even finished making breakfast. Just the fact that so many people are dismissive of Trump’s love of Twitter shows their disregard of the First Amendment.

“They may not like it, but they probably didn’t like Roosevelt’s fireside chats at first either. But it’s his way of getting his message across directly to the people,” said Hutchinson, who often signs his letters to the editor, “Deplorably yours.”

“People hate him because he’s not conventional, but people didn’t want another Washington, D.C., person,” he said. “Well, he’s not another Washington, D.C., person, but they’re wasting their effort when they’d be better off working on infrastructure or prescription drug prices for the people.”

As the hearings wore on, Hutchinson said he switched over to television — Fox News — to follow what was going on. He said that because the outcome seemed almost predetermined and “I’m getting sick of it,” he’ll likely switch the channel and maybe even watch a movie.

He spends a lot of time watching TV these days — his wife of 43 years, Nanette, died earlier this summer. It’s been tough. She was a conservative just like him.

“I married the girl next door,” he says. “I tried to joke to my kids that ‘We lost a Trump vote,’ but it’s hard.”

Like McHood, he laments the fact that the America they both love has become so divided. He recently had an altercation with a neighbor who resorted to calling him names.

“I could have escalated it, said some things right back ... but what good would it do?”

That is the America Salmon, the former Arizona congressman, sees.

But then he looks at Arizona from his seat at the front of the classroom, and he has hope.

In Congress, he developed a reputation for working across the aisle with Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who is now one of the U.S. senators who will decide Trump’s fate.

He said that while he’s “disgusted with a lot of the leadership in both parties,” he believes Arizona’s delegation has the talent to start bridging divides if they put their minds to it.

Salmon just wrapped up a class at ASU, and almost all of his students noted in their end-of-class evaluations that they were more liberal than he is. Yet they wrote that they’d learned that “it’s OK to have a clash of ideas, but don’t make it personal. It doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”

“They seem to be rejecting tribalism, and that’s a good ray of hope,” Salmon said. “If folks in Washington could grasp that, you could get a glimmer of what America could be.”