Impeachment continues to lose ground in the polls, but we mustn’t fall for the argumentum ad populum fallacy. The fact that impeachment is increasingly unpopular does not imply that it is wrong, bad, or unmerited.
That is, unless it does. Because if impeachment is just a cynical stunt designed to change the polls ahead of 2020, then the public’s opinion of impeachment really is all that matters. In that case, ad populum is no longer a fallacy. And I’m afraid that’s just what this partisan impeachment is. As with the Republican effort against President Bill Clinton so long ago, there was a political calculation to weaken a sitting president and his party.
That’s why impeachment’s popularity, or lack thereof, is all that matters.
Minutes from now, Democrats will nearly all vote for an impeachment that has a 0% chance of removing Trump from office. Why? As Rep. Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, put it some months back, “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach the president, he’ll get reelected.” It’s not that Green speaks for all Democrats — it’s just that he happened to say it out loud when most of them wouldn’t.
Democrats aren’t fooling anyone with their feigned reluctance for impeachment. They’ve been hellbent on this since November 2016. After the 2018 election, they got excited, believing that the Mueller report was going to give them the excuse they needed for an early 2019 impeachment. When that failed and the Russian collusion conspiracy theory collapsed, they had to settle for something a lot less convincing.
Hence this hopelessly complicated Ukraine story and the laughably fake charge they have decided to call “obstruction of Congress.”
Trump behaved inappropriately in withholding aid from Ukraine. There’s no question. You could even say that he abused his power. This is the sort of abuse, like abuses committed by Presidents Barrack Obama, George Bush, and Bill Clinton, that should have been used against him on the campaign trail this fall. But that would involve some form of self-restraint, and that isn’t part of American politics.
Believe it or not, there is a legal remedy available to Congress when presidents fail to disburse authorized funds, as Trump did temporarily in this case. It’s right in the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Congress created a procedure for forcing the hand of any president who did precisely what Trump did.
But Democrats chose not to pursue that remedy, despite being aware of it. We know that they knew about it and that they are embarrassed about ignoring it because they deliberately misrepresented what that law says in their impeachment report. They opted against following that course because it would have taken at least a few months and probably would have involved litigation. Also, they never cared about aid to Ukraine, Ukraine itself, or anything else except impeaching Trump.
They probably also recognized that it was now or never for impeachment — this was probably going to be their last plausible excuse to do it before we got too deep into the 2020 election season.
Rep. Will Hurd, the Texas Republican who is retiring from politics next year partly out of frustration with Trump’s brand of Republicanism, summed up my own view of this partisan impeachment when he explained why he would be voting against it. “An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelming, clear, and unambiguous,” Hurd said. “And it’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly.”
You don’t even have to like Trump. If you think this impeachment fulfills either of those two criteria, then you are believing your own propaganda. Eventually, the voters will set you right.
After all, vox populi, vox Dei, isn’t it?
