Hi It's Stupid: Impeachment

(No Bruckner, a composer I really can't stand, but this Wagner, conducted by Levine to last a full minute longer than Wilhelm Furtwängler's version, illustrates the kind of agonizing drawing-out alluded to in the reference below.)

Hi, it's Stupid to say I've been completely wrong about the dangers of moving into full impeachment mode over the past few days, because I could probably change my mind again in about 20 minutes, but my main objections to the way it was going forward seem to have been answered: we are not moving to impeach the president over a single phone call where he probably acted like a gangster, and we're not going to rush to get it over with before the New Hampshire primary.

The phone call, or rather the whole effort from the Ukrainian election in April to now to put the squeeze on President Zelensky to do something to harm Joe Biden or risk the US funding of the Ukrainian effort to hold off Russian conquest, which I still think is more Giuliani's baby than Trump's, is important for a couple of genuine reasons, as veteran Carl Hulse puts it at The Times, not just because of the exceptional clarity of the case itself but also because of the exceptional illegality of the White House response to public questions about it:

In contrast to the murkiness of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, Democrats see the current allegations as damningly clear-cut. His refusal so far to provide Congress with an intelligence official’s whistle-blower complaint as required by law, coupled with the possibility that Mr. Trump dangled American military aid as a bargaining chip to win investigation of a political rival by a foreign government, strikes them as a stark case of presidential wrongdoing.

I still don't get exactly why this anonymously sourced, extremely vague story seems to be having so much more impact than the Mueller Report did (and I'm still afraid as we learn more about it the impact will diminish). Perhaps it's just the fact that the White House has been blindsided by the speed with which it's emerged, unlike the slow release of Mueller, conducted by Barr like a Bruckner symphony, so that everybody felt just exhausted and battered long before the climax arrived. Instead, we've already got confessions, more or less, from Trump and Giuliani, and video of them self-evidently lying, and this seems to have really shocked some Democrats in Congress from suburban Republican constituencies (I imagine especially those who were absorbing the news from inside their districts and hearing directly on the street from voters over the weekend, though at least one of them, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, who I heard on the radio yesterday, insisted that her voters were divided, and another, Max Rose of Staten Island, is still on the fence).

I do get the importance of the legal issue—it's an absolute requirement that once the inspector general for the intelligence community decides a whistleblower complaint is "serious and urgent" it must go straight to Congress, and the refusal of the acting DNI to release it is a serious, impeachable scandal in its own right (Trump has told Pelosi he has nothing to do with it, and President Mulvaney may indeed have not bothered to tell him, for all I know), more unambiguously illegal than all the other stonewalling the White House has done. At least Barr seems to understand it that way, or the magic word "impeachment" really has unlocked Aladdin's cavern, and the complaint is going to be produced, maybe before the end of the week, and very likely the whistleblower her- or himself.

If the use of the I-word really does have that effect on the whole range of documents and witnesses the administration has been trying to keep hidden from Congress, then I've been really wrong, but we'll see about that. I have more faith in the ongoing court process. It's not like they're bending on releasing Trump's tax returns, in fact it looks like Barr has orchestrated a whole resistance movement on that—

Federal prosecutors join President Trump to block a subpoena seeking his tax returns https://t.co/DfKupJIgj7

— TIME (@TIME) September 25, 2019

Meanwhile the impeachment inquiry process as Pelosi envisages it appears to be very much the kind of thing I've been looking for: pretty much plugging the magic word into the same thing that's been going on since spring, with six House committees—Judiciary, Intelligence, and Oversight, plus Ways and Means (which is responsible for getting those tax returns), Financial Services (Maxine Waters, chair, looking for money laundering), and Foreign Affairs (looking specifically at the Trump-Putin relationship). So it's not narrowed, as I feared, at all, and if the whistleblower fizzles—be prepared for that possibility, because much as I long to hear that Putin is in there, I could plainly be wrong about that too—they'll still be working on all of it.

As for the tempo of the investigation, that is definitely going to be slower than some of our friends would like, but I'm very positive. It's still the case, as far as I'm concerned, that impeachment is never going to lead to conviction in the Senate, but it can be much more than that. I'm as opposed as ever to impeachment for the metaphysical purpose of "holding Trump accountable" without actually stopping him from continuing to commit crimes in the White House, but I seriously believe as part of the presidential campaign it could contribute to bringing justice to the Republican party and bringing it to an end in the poisonous path it's followed for the past 50 years, and it's well worth trying.