Power Grab

by Jason Chaffetz

  If one or more articles of impeachment receive a majority vote, they are passed on to the Senate for trial with the Chief Justice of the United States presiding. With the opposition party to the president holding the majority in the House, that part may also sound easy. But consider that many of the seats Democrats won were very close races, with seven in California that involved heavy ballot harvesting to get across the finish line. Can vulnerable members in Republican districts afford to support articles of impeachment?

  Assuming they do, and a simple majority votes to forward one or more articles of impeachment to the Senate, conviction requires a two-thirds majority—66 votes—in that body. That implies a need for bipartisan support. Both Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998–99 were impeached by the House, but neither was convicted by the Senate. Republicans now hold 53 seats to Democrats’ 47. To get Republicans to vote for conviction, Democrats would need a slam-dunk case for high crimes and misdemeanors.

  Even with a conviction, removal from office is still not automatic. It is just one penalty that can be invoked upon conviction. Furthermore, since the process of removing a president from office has never been invoked, questions remain. A constitutional crisis could ensue over the question of whether an appeal could be brought and to whom.

  The chances of a successful impeachment that removes the president from office are slim. But if the goal of invoking the process is to weaken the president prior to the 2020 election rather than to remove him from office, some may see it as a risk worth taking. However, the opposite is also a possibility. Early 2019 polling suggests that even among Democrats, support for impeachment is falling. CNN reported in the spring of 2019 that an SSRS poll found a 7-point decline in support for impeachment among Democrats between December 2018 and March 2019.

  With the president’s approval rating on the rise and a strong economy driving support for his policies, the threat of a backlash to impeachment efforts cannot be ignored. A March 2019 analysis done by Politico titled, “How Trump Is on Track for a Landslide in 2020,” concluded, “But if the election were held today, he’d likely ride to a second term in a huge landslide, according to multiple economic models with strong track records of picking presidential winners and losses.”

  Republican Efforts to Impeach President Obama

  I wish to make one thing clear: I never called for President Obama’s impeachment, nor contemplated it. But I did respond to a question about it. Ironically, if you were to do a search of Republican calls for impeachment of President Obama, my name would be one of the first to come up.

  In a 2013 interview with Thomas Burr, a well-respected reporter for my hometown newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, I spoke about the lies we had uncovered from the Obama administration with regard to the Benghazi attack. Burr asked me if I would rule out the possibility of impeachment. At that point, we didn’t know what we would find.

  Would I rule it out? That was the question. Of course not. Why would anyone do that when you don’t yet know what you’re going to find? How many Democrats were ruling out impeachment before the Mueller Report was released? I responded, telling Burr:

  It’s certainly a possibility. That’s not the goal but given the continued lies perpetrated by this administration, I don’t know where it’s going to go. . . . I’m not taking it off the table. I’m not out there touting that but I think this gets to the highest levels of our government and integrity and honesty are paramount.

  The Tribune’s story went viral, with Politico and many other national outlets running with headlines like: “Chaffetz: Impeachment Not Off the Table” and CNN’s “Chaffetz Doesn’t Rule Out Impeachment for Obama.” Suddenly it had blown up into a global story. It seemed every political reporter in America was calling for a quote on a topic I hadn’t even brought up.

  I can say with confidence that at no point did House Republicans sit down together and strategize how we could use our investigative power to impeach the president. That never happened. Had evidence come back implicating Barack Obama, that would have been a different story. Impeachment is a constitutional remedy that exists for a reason. Why would I take it off the table? It would be irresponsible to summarily dismiss it.

  The hyperbolic response from the mainstream media and the exaggeration from left-wing blogs and pundits took me by surprise. Pundits seemed to be talking impeachment more than anyone in the Republican Party. Jonathan Chait actually wrote a piece for the liberal New Republic in October 2010 predicting that Republicans would impeach Obama. In retrospect, his arguments were prophetic. Not with regard to Obama—they were completely off base there—but with regard to Trump.

  Chait, in a piece called “Scandal TBD,” predicted that Republicans would impeach Obama if he won a second term. Chait believed then–Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa, Republican of California, would lead the charge. None of that turned out to be true, of course. There was never a serious effort to impeach Barack Obama by Issa or anyone else. But if one reads Chait’s predictions and substitutes the name Donald Trump where Chait has written Barack Obama, and Jerry Nadler where Chait has written Darrell Issa, the whole thing makes a lot more sense. Chait writes:

  No doubt more outrages would command Issa’s attention. Just as a rigorous IRS audit of a taxpayer is bound to turn up something, an investigation by the likes of Issa will eventually produce a scandal. Once you have grasped hold of the investigative machinery, the process drives itself.

  Chait went on to cite statistics showing 35 percent of Republicans already favored impeachment in 2010. Yet today, Democrat support for impeachment has bottomed out at 36 percent after hitting 43 percent in December 2018. According to Chait, “That is a large base of support to impeach Obama for literally anything at all.” Chait’s assessment of the opposition party’s view of the president is even more applicable today than it was when he wrote it, provided you make a few changes:

  This is the conservative progressive view of Obama Trump—a left-wing right-wing radical who seized power via an economic crisis, smuggled radical views into the White House, and used unfair tactics to force an unpopular transformative left-wing right-wing agenda upon a conservative liberal country.

  The history of modern Washington is a history of the social norms that once restrained political parties from no-holds-barred warfare falling by the wayside, one by one. Why would Republicans Democrats impeach Obama Trump? The better question is, why wouldn’t they?

  They still might. By the spring of 2019, with the economy humming, support for the president rising, and hopes for a collusion or obstruction charge dashed, impeachment wasn’t looking like such a good strategy after all. That’s when a new strategy surfaced.

  The Slow-Bleed Strategy

  Just six weeks after Pelosi’s leadership team assumed their roles in the House majority, word leaked that Democrats were planning a slow-bleed strategy against President Trump. Axios’s Mike Allen described a strategy of “lengthy public hearings and scores of witnesses to methodically pick apart Trump’s finances and presidency.” The strategy would be coordinated with six to eight committees, essentially putting Trump on trial for the duration of the 2020 election cycle.

  Allen quotes an anonymous source close to House leadership as saying, “Many in leadership believe impeachment could help Trump get re-elected,” and therefore, leadership instead planned to “pivot the anger to defeating him on the campaign side next year. . . . The last thing they want to do is help Trump like it eventually helped Clinton.”

  Indeed, the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton were widely believed to have helped the man accused of lying under oath about his sexual escapades with an intern and obstructing justice in the effort to hide it. Polling shortly after the impeachment vote showed a drop in support for congressional Republicans and an increase in the president’s support, with 67 percent of Americans telling pollsters they approved of the job Clinton was doing at the time.

  Incidentally, some of the same players in
today’s impeachment drama had bit parts in the Clinton impeachment, this time on the other side of the argument. A young Adam Schiff announced his decision to run for Congress shortly after the conclusion of the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1999. He told the Los Angeles Times that incumbent representative James Rogan’s role as a House manager in the Clinton impeachment hearings left Rogan out of touch with his district. “The record shows that persistent local needs have never held much interest for our local congressman,” Schiff said at the time.

  Today Schiff stands at the forefront of the effort to destroy Donald Trump. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff has taken it upon himself to be his party’s narrative maker. Unfortunately for Schiff, many of those narratives he created for the media have not aligned well with the facts ultimately released. The Federalist analyzed the competing narratives given to the press by Schiff and Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, in advance of the Intelligence Committee’s FISA report release. Schiff told the media the committee’s report would contain cherry-picked, misleading information that was highly classified and would compromise sources and methods.

  His narrative contradicted information from Gowdy, who previewed a report that would show the FBI had presented the unverified and uncorroborated Steele Dossier as evidence to the FISA Court without divulging the Clinton campaign as the source of that material. When the report was released, Schiff’s spin was exposed as false. There was nothing reckless or dangerous in the memo, as Schiff had suggested. The facts bore out Gowdy’s story, not Schiff’s. Schiff has repeated that performance again and again, promising evidence of collusion that a year later still has not surfaced. He pointed to the president’s Twitter feed as evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Schiff is so busy spinning narratives to promote impeachment that he has destroyed his own credibility.

  Likewise, Maxine Waters is singing a very different tune about the Trump impeachment than she did in 1999. At the debate to plan an impeachment inquiry of President Clinton, Waters spoke passionately against the proceedings. In her floor speech, she attacked the bias of Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, saying, “Mr. Starr’s close relationships with groups and individuals with demonstrated hatred for the President taints the independent counsel’s investigation. This Congress does not need a protracted, open-ended witch hunt of intimidation, embarrassment and harassment.” Of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Waters in December 2017 said in a press conference, “There is an organized effort by Republicans . . . to spin a false narrative and conjure up outrageous scenarios to accuse Special Counsel Mueller of being biased.” Of Clinton, Waters said impeachment proceedings only tear the nation apart. “It’s time to move on,” she said at the time. “Reprimand the President. Condemn him. But let’s move on. These grossly unfair procedures will only tear this Congress and this nation apart. . . .” Fast forward to 2019 and Waters is all in for the process she once said would tear the nation apart.

  When Impeachment Is Called For

  I am a big believer in the impeachment remedy for civil officers. In fact, I called for the impeachment of IRS commissioner John Koskinen after he repeatedly provided misleading testimony to Congress, failed to comply with a congressional subpoena, and failed to preserve 24,000 emails relevant to our investigation of IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits. But for the president of the United States, the ultimate check on his power is an election.

  With the next presidential election already under way, voters get the ultimate say on whether allegations against President Trump represent grounds for impeachment. They get to decide whether firing James Comey—a man the FBI, the OIG, and some Democrats said was “insubordinate”—constituted obstruction of justice. Voters can decide whether they believe President Trump violated the Constitution by imposing travel bans, criticizing the media, or building a wall.

  Impeachment of an elected officer should be used sparingly and with great caution simply because there is another, less intrusive check on power in the form of an election. In such cases, impeachment overturns the will of the voters, divides the country, and distracts the government from the priorities Americans care about. However, in the case of civil officers, there is no other remedy to remove someone who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. This type of impeachment should happen more frequently.

  One of my great regrets about my time in Congress is that House Republican leadership refused to back my committee in the effort to hold IRS Commissioner Koskinen accountable. They didn’t think protecting our subpoena authority and disincentivizing future witnesses from lying to Congress was a worthwhile endeavor. I think even the Democrats should have supported that effort. They are the ones who will now bear the consequences of the precedent they supported. The administration could not be blamed for believing they could get away with a failure to be responsive to congressional investigations, given what Republicans allowed the Obama administration to get away with. The president, who obviously wasn’t very concerned about the efforts of Koskinen’s agency to shut down conservative groups, refused to remove him. Impeachment was the final check and balance Congress could impose.

  Nevertheless, impeachment should be a last resort, not a first resort. I do think impeachment is appropriate when administration officials overtly lie to the committee. In our battle over Koskinen, it was a last resort. The problem was, I couldn’t get nearly enough other members of Congress to support it.

  During the Obama presidency, we never seriously considered impeachment of the president. Had we not been asked about it by reporters, the subject would not have even come up. Democrats should not resort to impeachment without solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

  A warning to Democrats from David Axelrod, former chief strategist to President Barack Obama, made one of the best arguments I’ve heard. Axelrod wrote on Twitter,

  Dems should NOT commit to impeachment unless & until there’s a demonstrable case for one. It is not just a matter of politics. It’s a matter of principle. If we “normalize” impeachment as a political tool, it will be another hammer blow to our democracy.

  Axelrod is right.

  Impeachment was never intended to be a do-over of an election result some voters don’t like. To treat it as such undermines the most foundational components of the most successful government in human history. But this is exactly what Democrats have done. They were never interested in using impeachment as a check on government corruption. Weaponizing hysteria and hyperbolic rhetoric, they reduced an important constitutional tool to a partisan power grab.

  Chapter 11

  A Positive Path Forward

  The no-holds-barred effort to delegitimize President Trump has polarized the electorate, paralyzed the Congress, and popularized contempt for key elements of our constitutional framework. It wasn’t just the contrived allegations of Russian collusion, the nonstop coverage of evidence-free allegations, or the hand-wringing over whether to “normalize” the president of the United States. It was the knee-jerk resistance to every nominee, every policy position, every human being who dared support the sitting U.S. president. In exaggerating the threat of Trump to such an extreme degree, Democrats have themselves become the threat. They have personified the very menace they warned us about.

  Refusing to accept the results of an election undermines our whole system. This is one thing Hillary Clinton got absolutely right. In a preelection rally in 2016, she criticized candidate Trump for failing to acknowledge whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost. Doing so, she said, would pose a threat to our democracy.

  We’ve been around 240 years and we’ve always had peaceful transitions no matter who won or who lost. . . . We know, in our country, the difference between leadership and dictatorship. And the peaceful transition of power is one of the things that sets us apart. It’s how we hold our country together, no matter who is in charge.

  Her words proved prophetic, even though they applied in reverse. Her supporters
were the ones who refused to accept the results of that election, but her prediction of how that response would impact our system has proven true. Rejecting the results of the election, many instead turned to a resistance dogma that continues to undermine our most successful institutions. Ironically, even Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who has yet to concede her loss in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, weighed in on the damage Trump’s refusal to preemptively agree to concede would do. “Trump’s refusal to concede the election if he loses proves he is a petty man uninterested in our national stability,” she tweeted in October 2016.

  This dogma has especially infected Congress, compromising that body’s ability to perform the functions that move our country forward. Congress has always been driven by politics. But what we’ve seen in the last two years is truly unprecedented. The shortsighted efforts to win the news cycle are not just undermining public trust but creating long-lasting damage to foundational institutions.

  Many like to give lip service to the Constitution even as they seek to eliminate its most effective innovations. Others insinuate that we have somehow outgrown the government given to us by the Founding Fathers—that some of the key structures they built have become archaic and no longer work for a large, diverse, multicultural country.