No distinctions allowed in impeachment circus

N o one is covering himself with glory in the impeachment circus. That may be why only the most politically partisan people seem to be paying much attention to it.

Far from trying to diminish the controversy, President Trump fuels it with ever more intemperate and self-demeaning statements and behavior. Meanwhile Speaker Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, is withholding the impeachment resolution from the Senate until, she says, she can negotiate with the Senate’s Republican majority rules she finds satisfactory for the president’s trial.

More likely Pelosi is withholding the impeachment resolution because its particulars are weak and will not achieve a two-thirds majority for conviction in the Senate or command a majority in public opinion, and because Democrats are hoping that better evidence against Trump will turn up eventually, evidence that can be incorporated in another impeachment resolution.

The president seems determined to encourage such hopes.

But the Senate doesn’t have to negotiate with the House over the rules for an impeachment trial. Indeed, the Senate doesn’t even have to hold a trial at all. The Senate can ignore the House resolution, effectively nullifying it, or acquit or convict entirely without a trial. For in 1993 the Supreme Court upheld the Senate’s conviction of a federal judge who had been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate without a trial — convicted only on the basis of a Senate committee report. The court found that the Constitution gives the Senate power to handle impeachments however it wants — that even though the chief justice is to preside over any trial in the Senate, impeachment is an entirely political matter.

So the complaints from Democrats that Republican senators have shown that they cannot be “impartial” in an impeachment trial of the president are doubly ridiculous.

It’s not only because the legal precedent here is against the Democrats. It’s also because there is probably no one in the country who does not already have an opinion about Trump so strong that it would disqualify him from serving as a juror in an ordinary judicial proceeding involving the president.

Yes, as Democrats complain, the Senate Republican leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, cannot be impartial about the president when he admits coordinating with the White House the Republican majority’s approach to impeachment. But neither can many Democratic senators be impartial, and especially not Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who has spent much of the last couple of years twitching with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

That’s the big problem about this impeachment. For most people in politics the facts and details about Trump really don’t matter. What matters is only whether they like or hate the president generally. Of course in such circumstances there can be no due process of law.

Meanwhile the Constitution authorizes the House to construe anything as an impeachable offense — a “high crime or misdemeanor” — even wearing socks that don’t match, just as the Constitution authorizes the Senate to acquit or convict just because it is politically expedient to do so.

Anyone who tries to make distinctions in this food fight — who argues, for example, that the president is a dangerous and vile buffoon but has not committed any traditionally impeachable acts — may expect only a pie in the face.

For most people what matters is only whether they like or hate the president generally. In such circumstances there can be no due process of law.