“We aren’t there yet, but we may reach a point at which the question has to be asked, Trump or Pence?”
Thus wrote Glenn Reynolds on Wednesday, Aug. 22. He was musing one day after, in the space of one hour, the news broke that both Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time fixer and bagman, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager, had been found guilty of various offenses.
“It’s not Trump or Hillary, as it was in 2016,” Reynolds reminded us. “In 1998, the Democrats could have gotten Bill Clinton to step down, or joined in impeaching him. leaving them with President Al Gore, who would have almost certainly have been re-elected. … It’s not 1998 for the Republicans yet,” he went on, but it isn’t too early for them to ask themselves if they want to repeat the mistake of the Democrats in going to the mat for a very flawed president.
[People believe Michael Cohen, but don’t want Trump impeached: Poll]
Clinton, after all, helped to constrain and embarrass his would-be successor. Worse still, he helped to cripple the case against Trump 16 years later. At the same time, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., was expressing similar views to reporter John Harwood. “If something comes out that is clear and convincing and impeachable, I think members will act,” he said. Harwood’s conclusion: “Cole didn’t rule out even a GOP Congress acting to cut Trump’s presidency short.”
Cole and Reynolds are not the Resistance, but anti-anti-Trump mainstream conservatives. This gives their pronouncements some serious resonance. And this comes the better part of a year after feminist firebrand Kirsten Gillibrand, who took “Mattress Girl” as her guest to one State of the Union, expressed the idea that Bill Clinton should have resigned when he was impeached twenty years earlier, leaving the White House to Gore. This surely would have deprived George W. Bush of his main case against him. It would have also allowed the Democrats to make a stronger case against Trump in the 2016 election, as they would not have already excused and defended a cad and a liar themselves.
This suggests that views concerning impeachment may be evolving. Instead of a knee-jerk and fervent defense of “their” president, parties may be asking themselves a new sort of question: How much do they owe to someone who goes out of his way to bring shame and disgrace on his party by displays of greed, lies, and lecheries that seem easy enough to avoid?
Is it too much to ask of a president that he not commit perjury? Why is the survival in office of one particular person, who showed no concern for the trust placed in him, count more than his party’s good name?
Clinton’s acquittal didn’t help Gore, who inherited his president’s taint without his political talents. In contrast, Gerald Ford lost to Carter in the wake of Nixon’s corruption, but just by an eyelash (he closed very strongly), and his loss paved the way for the Republican revival of 1980-1992.
Impeachment doesn’t annul or reverse the prior election, as the hysterics would claim. If it did, George McGovern would have become president in 1974, instead of Ford, Nixon’s handpicked successor. And of course it would have been Gore, not Bob Dole, who would have been president had Clinton been convicted. Hillary Clinton, no matter what happens, will still be on the outside looking in.
Impeachment was designed to punish an individual who turns out to be deviant, while leaving the party around him intact. Pence would not undo the Trump mandate, he would likely just pursue it more calmly. Let us not judge now on the incomplete facts of the moment, but adapt in a calm and a resolute manner to whatever facts may unfold.
