Billionaire Tom Steyer began tonight’s presidential debate by giving a perfect example of why so many Americans refuse to support the impeachment of a president who manifestly deserves it. By bragging that he “started” the whole impeachment “two years ago,” he highlights the fact that Democrats have been merely looking for a pretext to impeach all along.
Two years ago, it was constitutionally obscene to suggest that President Trump already merited impeachment. Sure, he was often offensive, repeatedly out of control, and mercurial, incompetent, and bigoted. But none of those things are offenses against the public weal that come anywhere near impeachability.
Yes, Steyer called for impeachment two years ago without a specific offense or pattern of interconnected offenses. That only makes him guilty of the worst sort of “gotcha” mentality while demonstrating a horrendous misunderstanding of the constitutional order. It makes impeachment look like a vendetta, not a rational response to wrongdoing.
I write this as a tireless critic of Trump, as one who suggested long ago that he should voluntarily resign, and as one who firmly supports impeachment for his radically inappropriate behavior regarding Ukraine. But resignation is a matter of honor, not of forcible removal. To use the rare and somber (but important) constitutional procedure of removing a president from office is to use the bluntest instrument the Constitution provides. Until trying to sic a foreign government on an American citizen — and one who is his political rival, no less — without a single U.S. investigation into that citizen, Trump had not committed the sort of gross abuse of power for which the framers designed the impeachment process.
Steyer was like the billionaire who cried wolf, and dozens of other leading Democrats joined him in doing so. It is for that reason that so many of Trump’s backers completely dismiss that the wolf has now appeared.
Steyer’s agitation for impeachment then was so outlandish as to disqualify him from serious consideration for the presidency permanently. He monumentally cheapened public discourse — and with tonight’s bragging, he cheapened it still further.
