Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Got Paranoia?

Via.

Just thinking out loud here:



Well, they didn't narrow them that far. Three articles were approved, on obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress (the one Trump and Barr are so busy committing at the moment with their refusal to obey Nadler's and others' subpoenas), and two rejected, on the administration's falsification of records of the secret Cambodia bombing (we could have jailed Kissinger!) and Nixon's own failure to pay taxes on government-paid improvements to his places in San Clemente and Key Biscayne, which was characterized in the Article as taking unconstitutional emoluments (Nixon must be laughing hysterically in his grave over what Trump gets away with on this score).

To Steve's point, I'd say the point when Capone went to trial in 1932 was to get him out of business and into jail, but busting Trump must also serve a function of public education, as busting Nixon did, because too many people don't see what he did as particularly wrong, and point the way to some needed reforms, like requiring presidential candidates to be transparent with their finances and presidents-elect to divest, and tightening the definitions of emoluments and nepotism, and protecting federal civil servants from intimidation and retaliation by political appointees, and so forth. Somehow separating DOJ from the White House. These things are desperately needed, and the impeachment inquiry provides the basis for understanding them (as the Watergate affair really did stimulate important reforms in election regulation).

But if the impeachment case starts right away and is strictly about how it's wrong for the president in private and his goofy lawyer in public to ask a foreign government for a cockamamie complaint against the opposing candidate, while it's certainly true that it's an impeachable crime, none of that is likely to happen.

My paranoid thought, going along with the stuff that Steve picked up on this morning, about all the non-leftists that appear to be getting interested in impeachment all of a sudden, from Willard Mitt Romney to (this morning, I think) New Jersey suburban Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer, goes like this: there are forces at work (of which Mikie and Josh may well be unconscious) making this impeachment go forward on narrow, legalistic grounds and avoiding the large political-economy and moral issues, and possibly setting in motion the exact scenario that Pelosi has been afraid of:
  • impeachment on these grounds will certainly fail to get through the Senate (if you think more than two Republican senators are going to go for it you have to listen to the way Rubio is talking about it) and Trump will not be convicted, which is not necessarily a problem but
  • it's going so fast it'll be over in December, and
  • it will not have captured the public imagination, because it's just not fascinating, and everybody will get stuck on trying to figure out what Biden is accused of and nod out; except that
  • Trump's attack on Biden will make Biden more loved than ever among Democrats and he'll get the nomination, and
  • he'll lose the election.
We'll be very proud of our moral rectitude in "holding the president accountable", but he won't be held to account; he'll be president, and there won't be a second chance to impeach. As I've been saying, we're not going to succeed in simply impeaching Trump out of office; we need to look for some different political benefit, and conduct it accordingly. Like making it part of our own 2020 campaign.

Again, what I'm talking about isn't 11-dimensional chess but the one-dimensional Art of War, which is about timing. Tactically, as I've been saying, the correct time for an impeachment is in spring 2020, when it's already clear who the Democratic nominee is and the Republicans, with little in the way of primaries to occupy them, aren't prepared, and the correct subject matter for an impeachment is the president's conduct as enabled by the Republican party. It doesn't really matter who our nominee is, from this perspective, as long as the public has a picture of Trump doing whatever he wants, from getting the Air Force to pour per diem expense money into Turnberry to assisting Saudi Arabia in committing crimes against humanity for the sake of a loan on easy terms, while the Republicans passively watch.

Not something the general public stops thinking about before Christmas 2019, after the Senate finds him not guilty of doing some weird thing (the phrase we keep using, "attempt to interfere in the election", begins to sound meaningless when you understand they're not talking about manipulating the voting machines, and should always be more specific, as in "spread false rumors to vulnerable counties through fake Facebook accounts"). Something they start thinking about in the weeks before the Republican convention and first inter-party debates.

Trump is gleefully picking up on the Ukraine thing because he knows the evidence is unclear:
I could obviously be completely wrong on how bad the case might be. I guess the obstruction case for Trump on at least four or five counts is virtually written already, and they wouldn't try to leave that out, and the contempt of Congress citation practically writes itself. And it may be—if we get the whistleblower out before the public (and if I'm right that the whistleblower's evidence illuminates Trump's relationship with Putin)—that this is actually the best way to go. (Update: Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has indicated the whistleblower is "seeking to testify to Congress and is awaiting legal guidance from intelligence community officials.")

But we must talk about Trump's relentless search for ways of monetizing the office, and we must somehow keep it clear that this Ukraine case is just part of a very large-scale pattern, and we must ensure that it's not something everybody will have forgotten about by the time the election rolls around (I think that's to some extent what the Sherrills and Gottheimers want; they'd like to get it over with now so that the voters who get mad at them will have gotten over it, but they could be wrong too—they're not expecting to help get rid of Trump, but it they succeeded in doing it that might work for them even better).

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