To: Senate Republicans
By now it should have dawned on you that there is no escape. You are going to have to render a verdict not just on Donald’s Trump’s policies, but on his personal conduct. For just the third time in U.S. history, the Senate will hold a trial on the impeachment and removal of a president.
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You’ll have to vote up or down and your decision will have consequences that will linger long past this election cycle. The situation is already grim.
“It feels like a horror movie,” one senator recently told the Washington Post.
But it is all about to get worse: the evidence, the venue and the president’s conduct. There may be more smoking guns, the trial will be televised, and based on the past few weeks, Trump is likely to be more unhinged than ever.
In honor of the season, I offer you some unsolicited Halloween-themed advice to help you navigate the coming nightmare. If you take this advice, you have a chance of saving your party. Ignore it, and, well, you’ve seen what happens in those horror movies, right?
1. Don’t hide in the basement.
So far you and your fellow Republicans have been able to hide behind complaints about process and the claim that the impeachment probe is “illegitimate.” Your colleagues in the House actually stormed the secure hearing room in the basement of the Capitol and complained about the process even as a few dozen GOP lawmakers were inside being part of that process. It was juvenile and self-defeating. Sooner or later, you will have to confront the substance of case; and that is not likely to get any better.
You have to consider the possibility that there may be more transcripts, more tapes, more whistleblowers. The new evidence is not likely to be exculpatory, because the president’s conduct in pressuring foreign governments for dirt on the Bidens and obstructing justice has already been well documented.
The venue will also change. Republicans are complaining that the process has been secretive, but be careful what you wish for. The trial will be must-see television and not even Fox News will be able to keep much of the evidence from your constituents. Polls already suggest historically high support for the impeachment inquiry, and we have not even begun those public hearings. In short, pretending that the facts aren’t facts—that you’ll be safe behind your flimsy justification—is not going to help when everything is out in the open. Deal with it.
2. To kill the monster requires confronting how you made him.
As you watch this reckless and unleashed presidency it may have occurred to you how much you have contributed to this moment. You have convinced Trump that he can take you for granted. The president has bullied and berated you and, again and again, you have rolled over. And it has made things only worse.
Trump’s instinct is to escalate both his tactics and his language. The cascade of stories in just the last week—Ukraine, Syria, the G-7 and Doral, the launching of a criminal probe against his own Department of Justice, his reference to critics as “human scum”—are a microcosm of his presidency and where we are going.
Between now and the beginning of the Senate trial, that behavior could become even more erratic and you will be forced to defend an ever-widening gyre of inanities, deceptions, abuses of power, episodes of self-dealing and other assorted outrages. Imagine six months of Giuliani butt-dials.
The first step to saving your life is to recognize what the monster feeds on. In this case, it’s your fear of standing up to him.
3. You survive only if you fight back.
All the craziness might suggest that a policy of strategic silence is the best option. This includes not signing on to more resolutions like the one authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham condemning the House inquiry. Graham may be immune to humiliation and indifferent to history’s verdict, but you likely will not be.
You probably also think you can finesse this by finding a middle ground where you can acknowledge that the call to the Ukrainian president was inappropriate and Trump’s behavior questionable, but not impeachable.
But Trump may not let you. The president and his loudest supporters continue to insist that (a) the phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect,” (b) there was no quid pro quo, and (c) even if there was one, it was completely appropriate. Indeed, on Monday he urged to stop focusing on process and defend the merits of his actions. “I'd rather go into the details of the case rather than process. ... Process is good, but I think you ought to look at the case.”
The problem is that “the genius of our great president” demands total fealty. He will insist that acquittal be considered total exoneration, and he intends you to be a part of the whitewash. He wants you to embrace and ratify his conduct; and if you do, you will own it.
4. The sequel is often scarier than the original.
You need to consider the full implications of the precedent you will be setting if you vote to acquit the president. Imagine a second Trump term beyond the reach of credible constitutional accountability. Consider what that would mean for our political culture, constitutional norms and the future of your party.
“The boundaries of acceptable presidential behavior are defined by which actions the political system tolerates or condemns,” writes Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.
We are already “perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.”
Writes Wittes: “If a substantial group of members of Congress signals not merely that the president’s conduct does not warrant impeachment and removal but also that it does not even warrant branding as intolerable, such conduct will become normalized—at a great cost to previously unquestioned first principles of constitutional governance—even if the House impeaches Trump.”
This is why you should pay more attention to the Federalist Papers than Fox News.
On Fox News, the impeachment proceedings will be characterized as a “coup,” or an attempt to “overturn an election.” But they are neither.
5. Your ultimate weapon is always within reach.
Alexander Hamilton clearly envisioned impeachment as a constitutional check on “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He understood that impeachment proceedings were, by their nature, political, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” He also had no illusions about how divisive the process would be, noting that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” and that “in such cases there will always be the gravest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
But the founders reposed their confidence in you; or rather in what they thought the Senate would be. “Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent?” What other body, asked Hamilton, would feel confident enough “to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality,” between the accused “and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?” (Emphasis Hamilton’s.)
There’s a good reason to listen to Hamilton here—for the sake of the GOP.
Consider this: What if, instead of breaking with Richard Nixon in 1974, Republicans had stuck with him, deciding that Nixon’s impeachment was a test of tribal loyalty? What would the consequences have been if they had voted to acquit him on charges of obstructing justice, lying to the public, contempt of Congress and abuse of power? Specifically, what would it have meant for the Republican Party had it embraced the defense of Nixon’s corruption? If it had been less Barry Goldwater and more Lindsey Graham?
We know what actually happened. Even after abandoning Nixon, the GOP was punished in 1974 and 1976, but it was able to otherwise wipe the stink off relatively quickly, winning back the presidency in 1980 and holding it for 12 years.
But what if the party had gone all Watergate-is-no-big-deal? If it had, it’s unlikely that Ronald Reagan would even have been elected, because the GOP would have been haunted by Nixon for a generation.
In your idle moments, you have perhaps wondered what your legacy will be. Here’s the answer; history will remember what you do over the next few months.
Short term, breaking with Trump will spark a nasty blowback. But imagine for a moment a post-Trumpian Republican Party freed from the baggage of Trumpist corruption. The choice is between a party inextricably tied to Trump, with all of his crudity, dishonesty, lawlessness and arrogance, and a party that has shown that it is capable of being a principled defender of constitutional norms.
At the end of this process, the simple narrative is likely to be that the president has abused his power, broken the law and sold out his country. You have an opportunity to hold him accountable by doing your constitutional duty. History will want to know whether you got scared and shirked it.
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