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President Trump has been impeached twice.
The first time was in 2019, after he was caught trying to extort the Ukrainian government into manufacturing “evidence” to use against Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential race.
The second time was after that race, in 2021, when he led an effort to overturn the election results on Jan. 6, culminating in a riot and assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Much of what Trump has done in his second term either meets or exceeds the threshold of his first impeachment. There is his corrupt profiteering off the presidency, his occupation of American cities with the National Guard, his use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as a secret police, his attempts to seize the power of the purse, his abuse of the pardon power, his unlawful political retaliation against law firms and universities and his attacks on press freedom — all impeachable offenses.
No, he hasn’t done anything as singularly transgressive as Jan. 6. But in a real sense, the second Trump administration is no less than an authoritarian conspiracy against the constitutional order — a Jan. 6 by other means, including a whole-of-government effort to subvert the midterm elections and preclude any prospect for true democratic accountability.
In Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton explained that impeachment covered those offenses that “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
By that standard, the despotic and anti-republican character of Trump’s presidency is itself an impeachable offense, above and beyond any particular action.
But while there is fertile ground for a third impeachment, it is unclear whether Democrats are willing to make one happen. When asked, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, has been noncommittal, saying that Democrats have neither “ruled anything in” nor “ruled anything out” with regards to a possible impeachment.
The former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has been soft-launching a campaign for president for the last year, says that Democrats should avoid impeachment altogether. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if Democrats should impeach Trump, he said, “No, because it’s not going anywhere, and it’s going to be a food fight, and it’s just going to be we return to the politics of fighting.” According to Axios, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois has taken a similar stance: “Don’t be impeaching anybody,” she said. “Let’s just get back to work.”
Rather than devote time to an impeachment investigation and a subsequent trial, the idea is that Democrats would pass legislation and attempt to make good on the promise of a more affordable America. But while it is important that Congress get back into the habit of legislating, it seems naïve to the point of delusion to think that Democrats would have anything like a cooperative partner in the White House. If anything, the loss of a supine Republican majority and the prospect of any accountability is quite likely to push Trump to abuse power even further. Think of it as a game of chicken, in which he’s daring the Democratic majority to try to stop him.
We can already see inklings of this. He has basically threatened, for example, a post-election escalation of the war in Iran. It is not hard to imagine a future in which, cornered by defeat, Trump lashes out in ways that only underscore his threat to American democracy.
In that world, it is foolish to take impeachment — the Constitution’s main remedy for a rogue executive — off the table, even if the odds of removal are slim to none. Even in the absence of a conviction, the impeachment process is a valuable political tool. It underscores, for the public, the simple fact that the president is unfit to serve. And an extended impeachment investigation could uncover the kind of pervasive wrongdoing, even criminality, that could lead to real accountability for other figures in the administration.
If nothing else, impeachment would show voters that Democrats were not simply blowing smoke when they accused the president of lawless behavior. It should be said as well that a serious investigation would put pressure on the Republican Party, which would either have to distance itself from Trump or, more likely, bind itself even closer to an unpopular but vengeful and vindictive president. Ahead of the next presidential election, impeachment would put Republican hopefuls between a rock and a hard place.
Impeachment might be inconvenient to Democratic leaders and it might carry some political risk, but it is simply not tenable to allow the president to run roughshod over the rule of law and the constitutional order without meaningful, constitutional pushback. As flawed as it is, impeachment is the tool we have for that particular job.
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