Impeachment is over: The Senate just voted to acquit President Trump and not remove him from office. This was always going to be the result of the Democratic Party’s impeachment efforts given the Republican majority in the Senate. But the Democrats’ undue haste undermined the seriousness of the process, guaranteeing its failure.
The House passed two half-baked articles of impeachment: the first accusing Trump of abusing his power and the second alleging obstruction of Congress. The first article had some merit, but the Democrats failed to prove it. The second was ridiculous from the get-go, yet Democrats spent countless hours attempting to straw man it into legitimacy.
The Democrats’ case primarily rested upon the first allegation: that Trump abused his power by withholding foreign military aid and compelling a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The problem is Democrats were never able to tie the aid freeze directly to Trump’s request for an investigation. What’s more: Democrats were never able to prove that Trump did not have a legitimate reason to investigate corruption in Ukraine, whether it had to do with 2016 election meddling or the Bidens’ business dealings.
If the Democrats had not rushed through the House’s impeachment investigation, there’s a chance they would have been able to establish a legitimate case with compelling witness testimony. But they opted not to litigate in order to obtain firsthand testimony, relying on the Senate to do it for them. This laziness made it all too easy for Senate Republicans to move on, dragging public opinion along with them.
The Democrats also failed to convince the Senate that Trump’s alleged abuse of power was impeachable. Presidents abuse power all the time, and the answer is rarely impeachment. Trump’s legal defense team went a step further and argued abuse of power is too vague an accusation to warrant impeachment. The constitutional framers would beg to differ — they did, after all, leave room for “crimelike” actions. But even so, Trump’s team made a good point: Impeachment is a serious instrument that should be used only as a last resort.
The public wasn’t convinced, either. Public opinion has remained largely divided along partisan lines. Most agree Trump’s actions were wrong and maybe even impeachable, but at least half agreed removal from office was a step too far.
Sen. Marco Rubio explained this divide well in a statement released Monday: “The removal of the president — especially one based on a narrowly voted impeachment, supported by one political party and opposed by another, and without broad public support — would, as [Jerry] Nadler warned over two decades ago, ‘produce divisiveness and bitterness’ that will threaten our nation for decades.”
Trump’s acquittal was necessary. The Democrats’ charges were incomplete, and removing the president from office on these articles alone would have further polarized the country while setting a dangerous precedent that would have defined future divided governments for years to come. The Democrats knew this, but they also knew their case was doomed from the start.
