To Impeach Or Not To Impeach?

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Hi, Radio Atlantic listeners.

I'm Isaac Dover, staff writer here at The Atlantic.

Another action-packed episode for you today, with one of the big questions looming over everything in Washington, especially since the release of the Mueller Report last week.

Impeachment.

This is a complicated topic.

It's an emotional topic.

It's a visceral topic.

It's a topic that most Democratic leaders want to avoid and most Republican leaders won't even touch.

There are questions of whether it's the right thing to do or the practical thing to do.

But so far it's a debate going on mostly among Democrats.

None of the leaders in the House support impeachment right now, though some of the members do.

And of the 2020 Democrats, Elizabeth Warren supports impeachment, as does Julian Castro, but most of the other candidates have either said no, including Corey Booker and Bernie Sanders, or they've ducked the question in one way or the other.

Well, here at The Atlantic, we have one of the people who's thought the most about this topic and wrote a very long and very interesting cover article about this for the March issue of our print edition.

That's Yoni Applebaum, the editor of The Atlantic's Ideas section.

The headline on his piece, Impeach Donald Trump.

So you can guess where he stands on the question.

Also with us is Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large of Vox, where he hosts the Ezra Klein Show and co-hosts the Weeds podcast.

He's argued for normalizing impeachment, but after the Mueller Report came out, he wrote that since it didn't meaningfully change the story, Democrats probably shouldn't pursue impeachment.

It's a political remedy, after all, and he thinks the politics might end up helping Trump more than hurting him.

So we figured we would have a discussion or a little bit of a debate.

Should Congress begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump?

Yoni, Ezra?

Thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic to help us answer that question.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

So let's start with the basic.

Do each of you think that Donald Trump has met the bar for impeachable offenses?

Yoni, we'll go to you.

Well, I think that's a really good question.

I think the bar that he has jumped over is that there is enough evidence now in the public record of potentially impeachable offenses that the only way to resolve the allegations is for Congress to move forward and have actual impeachment hearings.

Ezra, what do you think?

I think it's a hard question in this way.

There isn't a bar.

There isn't some line that is drawn out in the Constitution that says, you you know, when a president has done this, they've become impeachable.

You know, when I did my earlier piece on this, a case for normalizing impeachment, I spent a long time talking to constitutional law professors and reading old, you know, federalist arguments.

And I do think that President Trump's behavior, I think his evident unfitness for office, I think the obstruction for justice pattern that we've seen in the Mueller report, I think if you put it together, there's enough abuse of the public trust that I would consider it impeachable.

But I want to be clear that there isn't some objective thing you can lay down where, now that we've said it, everybody has to agree.

That's one of the reasons impeachment is difficult, because it's been left to discretion.

And in a political system dominated by highly polarized parties, discretion becomes partisanship.

Aaron Powell, we've got two presidents who were impeached, and one that was almost impeached.

In that line

that we can't quite nail down, do you guys think Donald Trump is further along than Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, or is he somewhere in the middle of those?

I think that what we have seen so far, what is on the public record so far, will put him, I don't know, somewhere between Clinton and

Nixon and not yet as far over as Andrew Johnson.

But each of these cases is particular and the allegations against those presidents are different.

And I think that Ezra is 100 percent right that

this is ultimately a judgment call made by by Congress as to whether the President has committed a sort of a gross breach of public trust and not, deliberately not, the same as a legal case.

If you were bringing a case to court, you would ask, what's the statute and what's the evidence, and does it establish beyond a reasonable doubt that there's been a violation of the statute?

And the framework quite deliberately approach impeachment differently.

They don't put it in the judicial system precisely because they have a more capacious understanding of what it's supposed to be examining.

Yanni, in your cover story in March, you wrote, Trump's actions during his first two years in office clearly meet and exceed the criteria to trigger this fail-safe.

But the United States has grown wary of impeachment.

The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.

I think it's important that that was written, it came out in March, so it was probably written in February.

January.

Yeah,

December, right?

It takes a little time to cook a story in the print edition of The Atlantic.

That obviously means that it came, it was all conceived while we knew that Bob Mueller was going through many of the things that he has now come out with, but before the report was out.

What does the Mueller report do in your mind

to this question about the unfitness and

the questions that Congress needs to address?

You called it an impeachment referral.

Well, it is, and I want to be clear about what I mean by that.

It's not that Robert Mueller determined that the President of the United States should be first impeached, then tried and removed from office.

It was that Mueller was reminding us about how the system is supposed to operate.

And it was something I think many in Congress had not been paying sufficient attention to.

And I based that both on their public statements and their private conversations: that this is not how they thought about it.

They, I think, had hoped that they could outsource this function to a federal prosecutor.

And Mueller kicked it back over to them.

And in doing that, he made the same argument that Bill Barr made in his memo to the president, the

same argument that Justice Brett Kavanaugh made in a law review article he wrote before he sent it to the Supreme Court.

And that is that

a sitting president cannot be charged under Justice Department guidelines with a crime.

And so when you assemble substantial suggestive evidence of criminal misconduct, there is only one remedy while the president remains in office.

That becomes a question for Congress and not for the courts or the judicial system to investigate.

And so when Mueller goes through the ten potentially obstructive acts, he winnows it down a little bit.

You know, there's You can parse it differently, but there's some of those he thinks clearly are not actually obstructive.

Others he fairly clearly indicates were.

What he's saying is, when he withholds his prosecutorial judgment, is that it's not his role to decide whether or not these are offenses that the President should be impeached for.

That's Congress's role, and Congress can only do that by holding hearings.

His role is to create the documentary record.

Potentially, a prosecutor could use the Mueller report to charge the president after he is either removed or leaves office.

But it's not Mueller's job to figure out whether or not these are impeachable offenses.

It's Congress's job.

And the report is a very long reminder to Congress that it has a duty to perform.

Andrew, what do you make of that?

Did it seem like an impeachment referral to you?

Here's the way I think about this.

To me, the problem we are facing is that impeachment is a broken mechanism within a broken institution.

And so the question of whether or not something is an impeachment referral, I completely agree with Yoni.

I think it's quite clear that Robert Moeller has decided in this report that he's going to walk up to the waterline of saying Trump obstructed justice, but also decide that he doesn't want to be the guy to say that, and so kick it to Congress.

So the question then becomes, what does it mean for Congress to have a duty to do this?

What does it mean for Congress to be able to do this?

I think it's always important to remember that One of the foundational flaws in the Constitution itself is that the founders did not envision political parties.

The idea was you would have these branches checking each other.

Obviously, the founders created a set of political parties reasonably quickly, but they certainly didn't envision the level of party strength and the centrality of party competition that we see today.

Impeachment as a mechanism has never been used outside of the context of the other party controlling Congress.

I think it's a really important point.

As far as we know, as far as our historical records can show us, impeachment is not a functional accountability mechanism if the president's party is in control of Congress.

Now, impeachment also, for the very same reason, is very unlikely to lead to removal given that Republicans control the Senate.

So there is a world where we don't have this level of party competition or the parties conceive of their roles differently.

And impeachment is a little bit more of the kind of trial we're talking about here.

I mean, on some level, like, why shouldn't Republicans want to get rid of an obviously unfit, obstructive president and replace him with Mike Pence, who I I frankly think would probably be a stronger candidate, both for them in getting things done, but also in running in 2020.

But they don't want to do that.

And so one of the difficulties with impeachment is that it should work.

I do think that where we are and where we have been before this, I was very fascinated in the Morning Consult poll that came out recently that this was a poll from after the Mueller report, that 53% of the people who did want to see impeachment, 53% wanted to see it because he was unfit for office, not actually because of the Mueller report, which is a view that I think actually holds quite a bit of weight.

But the problem that we're facing is that there isn't a lot of evidence that Congress can do this well, can do this in a credible way, can do this with an outcome that leads to anything beyond the outcome we're currently in, which is partisan war over the Moeller Report.

And that's depressing.

The idea that we don't have, that we have lost control of, what should be a fundamental mechanism of accountability in American democracy is more evidence that the system has begun to deteriorate in a way that should worry people on both sides of the aisle.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's sort of like, and neither of you are Donald Trump fans, but Yoni, you're an impeachment idealist, essentially, and Ezra, you're an impeachment cynic.

Ezra, I feel like your position is somewhat in line with how Nancy Pelosi has responded on this.

She said the other day: impeachment is a step that you have to take, bringing the American people with you.

She has talked about this in the past as saying she, when she was Speaker the first time around, did not impeach George W.

Bush over the Iraq War.

So that is the standard or the bar that she is using.

She did say to me when I talked to her the Friday after the midterms in November, right after the Democrats won the House, she said, what Mueller might not find indictable doesn't mean it's not impeachable, but she has backed away from that and just left this as the

fitness for office is no question.

She doesn't think Donald Trump is fit for office, but she doesn't want to impeach him.

Yoni, when you wrote your article, this is what you had to say about that.

This sort of vote counting misunderstands the point of impeachment.

The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office.

So that's more of your impeachment idealism here.

Well, I think I call myself an impeachment realist.

Let me read something that Alexander Hamilton.

All idealists always do.

Fair enough.

Alexander Hamilton.

If you're going to pull Alexander, I was thinking that we could frame this as like a rap battle between the two of you.

I'm going to do the next portion in verse, if that's okay.

Hamilton, you know, in general, the founders were not particularly alive to the dangers of parties, but this was one of the only instances where you can look back and see that they actually saw this quite clearly.

He wrote in the Federalist Papers that

this would arouse partisan passions, that in such cases, there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.

And he talks about how it would seldom fail to arouse the passions of the whole community.

He understood that impeachment was going to do that, was going to polarize the country, was going to be difficult to resolve through ordinary processes.

But here's why I think I'm a realist.

It's because the process of impeachment is not one that succeeds or fails based on the ultimate outcome.

That is, if you looked at this simply as a question of whether or not the Senate could remove a sitting president, you'd have to look back at the record of impeachment and conclude that it had never worked.

I think that's actually not right.

I think that you can look back at the record of impeachment and see that it has worked strikingly well in some cases.

So, for example, with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which falls a single vote short in the Senate,

we can see a variety of discrete benefits that accrue from following the process.

It wrests control of the public conversation away from a president like Johnson, who was inclined toward provocation and outrageous statements,

and allows Congress to focus the conversation on the issues that Congress thinks are important, on the President's abilities rather than his provocations.

It gives the public a chance to see the evidence.

Only about half of Americans will tell pollsters

that they have closely followed or paid a lot of attention to Mueller's investigation.

A tremendous number of Americans are not really tuned in to what is now now publicly known about the President's conduct.

Impeachment hearings will rivet public attention, always have in the past.

And more than that, they give us a rule-bound process for adjudicating this stuff.

Cable news panels are filling that void right now.

God, I would hate to have my fate rest on the debate on a cable news panel.

I can't think of a worse place to have this kind of debate.

But in the absence of a focused congressional impeachment hearings, that's precisely where it's taking place.

And so we're doing this in the worst possible way.

It's not that we are somehow avoiding the question of whether or not President Trump is fit to continue in office.

It's that we're doing it in a place where there isn't common evidence, where there isn't the ability to cross-examine witnesses, where things aren't entered into the public record, and where the most hyperbolic and vitriolic statements are rewarded, rather than in a process where the evidence needs to be parsed and claims substantiated.

So I think that there are real benefits to impeachment, whether or not it results in removal.

Ezra, before I wanted you to jump in, but I want to read something that you wrote in response to the Mueller report because it's something that I think it's worth thinking about here.

You wrote the Mueller report includes some new revelations, but few that changed the shape of the story as we already knew it.

So

this is this question of if we hadn't been acclimated over the last two years to a lot of these revelations, if the Mueller report had landed and we didn't know any of the stuff that was in there before, would that change how we were approaching this?

Do you think that you would be in a different place on this impeachment question and whether it made sense to push forward with the question of fitness for office through Congress and not through the debate on cable talk shows?

It very well might have.

I mean, I have a couple of thoughts here.

One is that I think the key thing that Nancy Pelissi said, because I'm not...

I'm not, and I don't think she is, opposed to the idea of impeachment.

I just don't think you can take the politics out of impeachment itself, which I think is something that people all of a sudden very much want to do.

The idea that public opinion doesn't matter here, the idea that this should be an automatic process, the idea that you don't have to work to bring along where the public is, seems quite wrong to me.

I mean, this is a fundamentally political process.

The founders decided to make it a political process.

They decided, as Yoni says, not to put it within the judicial branch such that it would be more insulated from politics.

And so, right now, you've had, after the release of the Mueller report, Donald Trump in the morning consul poll went down to his lowest rating as a president.

But the support for impeachment fell.

It fell by three points, down to 34%.

And I think part of that is that if we back up three months and we say, what in the Mueller report would lead to impeachment?

I think people would have said coordination, right?

Collusion.

That had been for a lot of people the core question here.

And it didn't find that.

It didn't.

I do not agree with people who says it found there wasn't that.

There's a lot there that I think we still don't know.

But you can't look at the Mueller report and say that it proved that central case.

What it did, I think, prove is a quite large amount of obstruction.

And so from there, you get into this question of, well, do you go into that in impeachment?

We can sort of argue about that Alexander Hamilton piece.

But I think for me, the most useful document on understanding impeachment is actually a book that Charles Black Jr.

wrote in the 70s.

He was a law professor.

It's called Impeachment.

And he's looking at it in the context of Watergate.

And he says something in it that I think is pretty interesting, which is that fundamentally the question of impeachment, because high crimes and misdemeanors is ill-defined.

He says, fundamentally, the the question of impeachment is a question of overturning and preempting a national election.

National elections, he argues, are honestly the only political act that we all do together.

And so, the idea that you are going to overturn that judgment or keep the American people from having the ability to do that judgment themselves the next time, that's a very grave question.

And it's a question that turns in part on what the American people think at the time.

And so, I would be very deeply opposed to the idea that we let the Mueller report rest, right?

That Mueller brings out the report and people read it or they don't read it and we move on.

I am also uncomfortable with the idea that at a time when two-thirds of Americans are not sold on the idea of impeachment, you jump all the way to impeachment and you then move the question, and this is one of my fundamental fears, you move the question away from Donald Trump's actual behavior.

from the actual things that we are concerned about and litigating and trying to get people to focus on, and you move it all the way to the question of should he be removed from office, which is a much more controversial and much tougher position to defend.

It's not indefensible, but it is, I mean, look at the polls, it is a tougher position to defend.

And that is why I don't think Nancy Pelosi is unwise to say this is a process of building public support, of focusing public attention, of holding these hearings, of putting forward that evidence, of trying to get people to focus, and trying to actually bring the public along.

Again, I think there's become this kind of moral,

there's become this rhetorical move that, well, this is too big to include politics in it.

And I think it's just wrong.

I think that you can't take politics out of politics as much as you might sometimes want to.

And so the idea that you want to build support for something as profound as impeachment is just not, to me,

an unwise stance.

So I agree with all of Ezra's premises, which is precisely why I've arrived at the opposite conclusion.

You know, if you look back at Nixon, in early February of 74, the Gallup organization asked, do you think President Nixon should be impeached and compelled to leave the presidency?

And Americans opposed that 51 to 38.

In April, they went back and asked again, and the public said yes, 52 to 33.

And the reason that the public flipped, there were revelations along the way, but a key driver of that was that in the interim, the House convened impeachment proceedings.

One thing that President Trump has reminded us again and again is that many views, precisely because they're political, are formed by party leadership and partisans fall into line.

And we've seen that, for example, on Republican views on Russia or free trade.

When the House leadership steps out day after day and says, gosh, we're not ready yet for impeachment, it is eminently predictable that if even the House leadership is not willing to go there, that many Americans will take that as a signal,

a political signal, that that is not the answer.

But when in the past a House leadership has said, no, no, this is something that we're going to do, and then has proceeded to do it and to show the public why it feels that impeachment is justified and merited.

I think that the historical record indicates that that is the best way to make a political case, that what the House is doing, saying let's proceed in stepwise fashion, let's have piecemeal hearings into a wide variety of things without ever quite saying that any of them might be impeachable, let's wait for some

deus ex machina to materialize and to suddenly shift public opinion in favor of impeachment is exactly backwards.

That in fact what you would want a House to do given that impeachment is a political process is to step forward and say we think it's time to trigger the process and that public opinion will then follow suit in the way that public opinion generally follows suit when political leadership shifts on a question.

And so it's precisely because it's political that I think Pelosi is going about this all wrong.

I want to say I think that's actually a good argument.

I'm not 100% on my own position here.

So I don't want to totally dismiss that.

I don't agree with your telling of Watergate there.

I think the revelations there were quite profound.

I think the analogous situation here would actually be if somehow you needed the House and that period to release the Moller report.

But

I do take the underlying point there.

I think the question that I keep coming back to, the one that is

quite difficult for me, is there's this view among the people I think calling for impeachment.

You very rarely see anybody say, we should do impeachment, but it doesn't matter if the public comes along, and it doesn't matter if it ends up with an outcome.

It's just a great process.

I actually think, and it's something I admire about your position on this, I think you're the closest on this, but mostly what I'm seeing is people say that, you know, if you're looking at the polls, you're doing something so crassly political at such a time of national import that you've already gone in the wrong direction.

And I see this not only the opposite way, but I think something people should consider about it, is that Politicians actually have a sense of their constituencies, that their electorates, they know something about them, that they are representatives for a reason.

And so one of the differences between what happened in the Watergate era and what is happening in this era is that a Democratic Party in the Watergate era, that was, by the way, quite a lot less polarized than today's Democratic Party, quite a lot less in a structural way

inclined to take on the president.

I mean, remember, Richard Nixon had dominated the previous election.

He hadn't lost the popular vote.

He had had one of the biggest victories in modern history.

A Democratic Party that was seeing a very different president realized looking at what was coming out, looking at the public, that there was support for this, that

this was something that needed to happen.

And by the way, Nixon, one of the revelations that came out, unlike in the Mueller report, where it turns out that it doesn't appear that Donald Trump was responsible for the underlying crime of the hackings, but might have tried to obstruct the investigations into it later, Nixon was responsible for the underlying crime.

There was a very different fact pattern that emerged.

So I think it is one thing that I think is not trivial here.

It's not just that the polls are against us, but it's also that the judgment of the political representatives seems to be against it.

And it's not just Pelosi.

Bernie Sanders doesn't seem to want to do it.

Corey Booker doesn't seem to want to do it.

And my point here is not that one should just listen to politicians all the time.

Obviously, a lot of my work is trying to get politicians to have better opinions.

I find it weird that it has become such an unusual argument that one has to build public support for something like this, that it is a profound act, and that pulling into this at a time when maybe you don't think it's going to lead to, certainly not to Trump's removal, but even to a healthy public debate.

I mean, one thing where I do think I part with Yoni is that I think sometimes when he describes the way this would go, he's describing a kind of Congress I have not seen.

He is describing an ability to hold a sort of elevated debate that creates some level, I don't want to say of unity because nothing's ever created true unity, but creates some level of consensus or common ground.

Certainly you had more of that in Whatgate when you had Republicans who were actually taking this very seriously.

And by the way, something that the political scholar Nicole Hemmer has talked about is imagine how different that would have been if you had Fox News.

Imagine how different that would have been if you had this system.

John Dean said that to me actually last year.

He said he thought, John Dean, of course, a key figure in the Watergate thing.

He said he thinks that if Fox News had been around, Nixon would have survived.

I think a good criticism, I think, here of my position would be that I'm sort of saying you can't use it, which is not what I want.

And as I said, I've written about the case for normalizing impeachment, which I'd like to see done as a culture thing.

So we're not seeing it as such a big issue every time it potentially comes up.

But I do think that, at least at the very least, one would have to think very carefully how to structure it so that you are trying to make the underlying outcome better.

Because I do think we should be mindful of the possibility that if this went the way the Clinton impeachment did, right, that what happened is the public looked at this, said Democrats are overreaching in a vendetta.

And that in the end, what it ended up doing was pulling the public towards Donald Trump, pulling them towards Republican House members running at those districts, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats won in 2018, that you could have, in the end, the legacy of the impeachment effort is that you strengthened Donald Trump, that you strengthened Republicans, that you made it harder to create real accountability.

And that's a part of this that scares me.

I don't think impeachment is not a process without risk.

It's a process with tremendous risk on all sides.

And so I think it needs to be entered into carefully.

And again, that's why if the idea here was to not do it, to not move forward on anything, I'd be quite opposed to that.

But the idea of Pelosi's effort to try to move somewhat slowly and deliberately does not seem crazy to me.

Okay, we're going to take a short break and we'll be back with more on these questions of the political legacy and the political future and current affairs of impeachment and how it's affecting this discussion as it goes forward.

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Okay, we're back with Yoni Applebam and Ezra Klan.

So we were talking before the break about this question of how the politics of it would work.

The legacy of what happened with Bill Clinton seems to hang over this for Democrats.

They say, look what happened when the Republicans overreached.

That didn't work.

But there's some of that that doesn't quite make sense when you look at the political results of it.

The Republicans were in control of the House and Senate before, during, and after impeachment.

Just a year or two after the impeachment proceedings was the 2000 election.

And George Bush, the Republican, won then, even though Bill Clinton was popular at that point and was at a time of peace and prosperity.

There was a shift in the parties there.

And by the way, Al Gore was, of course, very sensitive to these questions.

And part of the reason why he picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate was because Lieberman had been such a critic of Clinton, and so he was distancing himself.

So that legacy was there, and it worked in favor of the party that pushed forward with impeachment.

So

why is it that Republicans or why is it that Democrats should not learn from what happened with Republicans and say that the lesson that they take from the 90s is that actually impeachment can be politically good, Ezra?

So a couple things there.

One, I don't think that potted history actually makes sense.

So number one, I don't think you can say that the reason that George W.

Bush beat gore is because of impeachment or even that that worked in his favor.

I think that the

lot of political science on the 1998 election.

And so that's the one that comes amidst this crisis.

And I don't think there's a lot of argument that that led to congressional losses for the Republicans at a time when you would have expected congressional gains.

So then you do have 2000 and in 2000 George W.

Bush wins against Al Gore, not against Bill Clinton.

And impeachment is not a huge issue in the 2000 election on any level.

So I think you have to look at the election that is within the context of impeachment itself.

And that's the 98 election.

And

Newt Gingrich ends up resigning.

I mean, you know all this as well as I do, so I don't want to belabor it.

I don't think impeachment was an unbelievable civilizational calamity there for the Republican Party.

I just think it's something to take seriously and to be careful about.

The other thing I would just say here is that for me, the instrumental question here is about how do you protect the rule of law?

And the only thing right now in a Republican Party that has completely abdicated that question is democratic power, which, by the way, is a scary thing about the system anyway.

I think it's a real problem that anytime you want to talk about accountability in the political system, you have to phrase it as some kind of strategic question on the Democrats' part, as opposed to what both parties are doing and should be doing.

That's a real problem I don't have a great answer to.

This can't just be a purely partisan exercise.

The political system is not built the way it is designed.

You cannot have true accountability.

You need majorities that you cannot get outside of the context of a Republican Party that decides to be an actual player in governance.

My argument that I keep making here, and I could be wrong on it, right?

I mean, as you've said, you can take a different view of some of the politics here, but the argument I keep making is that the most important thing is actually the underlying question of accountability.

The most important thing is protecting the rule of law or it is protecting the country from, in my view, what would be quite calamitous

effects if Donald Trump's rule is validated and Republican behavior in this period is validated into a second term with enhanced majorities.

So the reason I take seriously the politics of this is precisely because I think the underlying question is so profound.

I would like it to be the case that there was a simpler, smoother way to get to the outcome I want.

But unfortunately, when I look around, there isn't.

I want to tackle that head on.

I think that Ezra has mounted the best case I've ever heard against impeachment, and I really appreciate that.

But I think I want to go back through a few impeachments here to suggest that we're putting the carp before the horse a little bit.

You know, if you go back to the Clinton impeachment, I think it was a disastrous impeachment.

I think that Republicans provided the model for how not to do it.

It's also the case that the number one trait in presidential candidates that year was unusually was honesty.

Voters said that was

the top thing they were looking at.

And eight out of ten voters who said that voted for Bush over Gore.

I should just close that I worked for Gore on foreign policy in that campaign.

But that was something that came up again and again in that election.

Voters wanted honesty in a chief executive, and I don't think that's that's separable from the impeachment proceedings and the surrounding scandals.

The mistake that Republicans made in, or one of the key ones that they made in the Clinton impeachment, was that they didn't do the work.

They jumped right to the actual articles of impeachment.

They got the Starr report, they heard from Starr, they heard from a handful of expert panels about Ethereum law, but they didn't hear from the witnesses.

They didn't air the evidence.

They didn't mount a concerted case for why

these were offenses that merited impeachment.

They voted out the articles in a rush, in a lame duck session, after they'd been rebuked at the polls,

and it rather predictably blew up on them to some extent, even though in the process it also deeply damaged both Clinton and the Democratic Party.

So I wouldn't view that as a model at all.

But it's not because I have some sort of elevated vision of how Congress can or should function.

If you look back...

In your piece,

you say that there's a good chance it won't succeed, right?

And that that's not the point of what you're arguing for, right?

Right.

And, you know, I think that the hearings in the House will be incredibly messy.

But it's precisely that messiness which I think will be useful.

You know, if you look back at the Nixon impeachment, it's not as if congressional Republicans start off thinking this is a great process.

No, they're adamantly against it.

Howard Baker goes to the White House and assures Nixon that he'll be in his corner.

And then

what Republican member after Republican member encounters is the haunting thought, not that what Nixon is doing has so disturbed them that he must be removed, but that by not acting, they will be endorsing this conduct by any future president, including one from the opposite party.

And when you look at the sort of the oral histories that these members leave behind, the way they've written about it, again and again, that's the theme that sounds.

When forced to confront the evidence day after day in hearings, when they have to see with their own eyes what Nixon has done, when they have to contemplate what inaction will mean in terms of authorizing any future president to behave in the same fashion, that's what really disturbs them.

And if if you go back to the Johnson hearings, you know, those are not responsible hearings either.

The very first charge that they consider impeaching Johnson for is that he conspired in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which was an insane conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it.

Although

that dominates in an era of a highly partisan press, of electronic communications by the telegraph that were inflaming passions and raising the stakes of any statement on the floor.

Nikki Hemmer is not wrong that Fox News makes this different than the Nixon era, doesn't make it a whole lot different than the Johnson era, when the press was more overtly partisan and when the threat of political violence was not theoretical.

You just killed three-quarters of a million people in a civil war.

But in that inflamed atmosphere, Congress was nevertheless able, in overtly partisan hearings, to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

They were able to look at the scurrilous and conspiratorial claims that had been lodged against the president and to separate those from the ones that had a substantial evidentiary basis.

And also, although they failed to remove Johnson, to get him to back down on the unconstitutional things he was doing, to curtail his behavior with a threat of removal, and then ultimately to leave him so politically damaged that neither party wanted to nominate him, although the Democrats end up taking Johnson's political agenda, which is a white man's government, and make their campaign slogan, this is a white man's country, let white men rule.

They take his agenda, but he is so politically damaged that he can't run.

And so when I look at this, it's not that I think the Congress is going to be some model of probity during these hearings, but rather that I think that the process itself, although it is partisan, although it is rancorous, tends to put the evidence in a place where people can't avoid it, where they can't avert their eyes, where over time they have to contemplate what the cost of inaction is.

And this is the last point, because if it is dangerous, potentially, to think about this like 98, 99, to think that this could backfire on Democrats and enshrine Donald Trump in a second term would extend the damage that I and others believe he is doing to the constitutional system.

I think we also have to contemplate what not moving forward with impeachment would do.

There's a scenario in which the House holds these investigations, but the presidential election is a binary choice.

And as we learned in 2016, lots of voters can be appalled by Donald Trump's personal behavior, be appalled by his lack of probity, think him unfit for office, and still, when they walk into that booth, pull the lever next to his name because they cannot contemplate the alternative.

It's not as if an election is a good mechanism for adjudicating this sort of thing.

It's precisely why you have impeachment and not merely sort of waiting things out.

You don't necessarily want to just throw this to an election.

It's not clear to me that Donald Trump loses the 2020 election.

And if Congress deems this sort of behavior not impeachable, if it doesn't move forward on this basis, I think it's an implicit authorization for any future president, whatever happens to Donald Trump, to behave as Trump has done, to try to politicize law enforcement, to obstruct justice at the moments when investigations touch on him or on close associates,

to flout campaign finance laws as his personal attorney alleges he has done.

If you allow a president to do those things and say, well, gosh, it didn't rise to the level of even impeachment inquiries, then you are greenlighting that kind of conduct by any future president, and that has consequences too.

That's part of the question here.

If this is an impeachment.

I'll ask a question of Yoni, if you don't mind.

So Elizabeth Warren was out at the CNN Town Hall the other night, and she was asked about impeachment.

And she said, this is not going to be long.

She said, we should do it.

But it doesn't take long.

She said, it's all there in the Mueller report.

This is like three days.

And so one of the things that I wonder about is...

I think there's like an world in which impeachment is handled the way you're discussing.

But the thing that I've actually heard a lot of Democrats say, including I think Warren, who at this point is the most prominent Democrat,

at least presidential level Democrat to come out for it, is that it would be a disaster to do the kind of long, slow hearings where like this is the only question for a long time.

What they want to do is take the Mueller report and do a rapid impeachment vote.

And then I guess like the impeachment fails in the Senate and then something.

I don't know about that as like a, you know, if impeachment just fizzles that way.

I don't know that it has changed future incentives, but I also think that's a, it's a, um

it's a weird question because I think that people are looking for it to be something that the people would be managing it don't want it to be because, you know, Warren included does not want to be running on impeachment she wants to be running on you know accountability capitalism and things like that so you end up in this thing with an election as close to this is where Democrats don't want to put on the kind of process you're talking about I'm curious how that or if that affects your view of this at all yeah it's a really good question I don't blame Democratic 2020 candidates for

wanting to run against a historically unpopular president that they you know just in pure political incentives might prefer to have Donald Trump in office when they go out on the hustings than to have him impeached and removed

or impeached and removed.

Well, he's not going to be, I mean, do you think there's a good chance of him being removed?

Because I mean, I might have a different view if I did, but I'm extremely skeptical of that.

Yeah.

What do you think at this point is a revelation that would have to come out for a two-thirds of a Republican Senate to remove him?

I feel like that's a kind of thing that like...

I think it is very hard to see it happening.

No, I think that's a really good point.

I cannot, I wouldn't endorse the kind of process that Elizabeth Warren has called for.

I think that it would be sort of an enormous mistake to repeat the Republican experience of rushing this forward on the basis of a third-party report rather than having a public hearing of the evidence.

And I think that at the moment, if you push this stuff out in the Senate, there is no conceivable way that you could get to a two-thirds majority.

On the other hand,

in neither the Johnson case nor in the Nixon case was it initially at all clear when impeachment hearings were initially convened that there was any way to move two-thirds of the Senate in that direction.

And so one of the things that I just have to take into mind is that historically impeachment proceedings have moved in unexpected directions.

They have surfaced evidence that wasn't previously publicly available.

They have crystallized public opinion to an extent that it hadn't been crystallized before.

I can't rule that out.

I can't rule out the possibility that

such hearings would bring to light information that would actually change minds in the Senate because it has happened at least twice before.

But I have to say that I can't actually see what that information would be or how that would proceed.

I just have to admit my own ignorance on that score.

What do you make of that, Ezra?

You know, it's funny because I actually think Johnson and Nixon are really interesting in different ways to think about it.

I actually like the degree to which we're thinking about Johnson here because Nixon to me, there are a couple of problems with the Nixon example.

One is that there isn't really a Mueller report in this way in the Nixon example.

A lot of that does come out through the hearings.

I mean, very famously, the tapes come out through the hearings.

John Dean has that incredibly powerful testimony before Congress.

And so much of the things like that have happened now.

So much of the things like that, Michael Cohen has already testified before Congress.

So the, and he is, he's no John Dean, I think it is fair to say.

And the Mueller report has pulled forward a lot of the revelations that I think we're likely to get.

Now, I'm not saying that it is impossible to imagine anything more coming out, but it is is a little difficult for me to imagine much more coming out.

We are not operating in the space where Congress is going to play the primary information finding role.

It would have been better, I think, in some ways if we had, but we're not.

And so I do think there's a question of there's two very, I think, quite different ways to think about this.

The first is that we don't know the story and we need impeachment to get it.

And that is something we've done before in this country.

And I think

it's an important thing to do when necessary.

And the second is we sort of do know the story.

And so so now we have to kind of figure out what to do with it.

Are we going to try to keep building on it?

Are we going to try to keep finding out parts of it?

Do we want to move to just removing the president based on what we have?

I think that for the Democrats who've been talking about this, I think they've been pretty explicit.

They are at the, we already know enough.

They're not looking to run an investigation.

I think the problem that they have, and I think this is a problem Pelosi and others are responding to, is that when they look at the country, when they go back to their districts, the public says, it's not enough.

And particularly, I think I've always thought, and this goes back to my 2017 piece, I've always thought Donald Trump's behavior and generalized unfitness for office is actually a quite good case for impeachment.

I think there's a lot of abuse of the public trust.

If you're really going to incredibly narrowly focus it on the Mueller report, which if you're doing it in this context, I think it'd be hard to do otherwise.

I think it would be understood.

I mean, the thing that Yoni is saying is an impeachment referral is the Mueller report.

The Mueller Report is a story where the underlying crime most people were most concerned about was not committed by Trump Trump or coordinated, at least as far as we can tell yet, with Donald Trump.

And then you have, I think, the strongest case for obstruction are things Donald Trump wanted to do, but ultimately didn't do.

And there's actually a very good discussion, I think, on The Weeds, which is my podcast, but I was not on this episode just the other day, about how sensitive Donald Trump was about always walking up to that line, but not quite saying it.

He's very, he really seems like somebody who, for all of his personal erraticism and recklessness, knows how to walk right up up to the waterline of ordering somebody to do something or committing a crime, but not quite doing it, or when they say no, not quite pressing it.

He does not ultimately say fire Jeff Sessions.

And so if you're going to end up in that exact morass, then I think there's a question of why you think this is going to lead to a very different set of revelations or a very different set of outcomes that you're not going to get through investigations and hearings.

I want to read a statement from a senator about the Mueller report.

I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the president.

I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia, including information that had been illegally obtained, that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement, and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.

Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.

That is from Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah now, obviously also the 2012 Republican nominee for president.

That comment did not go over well with President Trump.

He took a number of political swings at Romney after that statement came out.

Should say Romney had read the full report, not just the redacted report.

And that was the statement that he put out.

But that was the statement.

And as we've seen in the past, the Republican leaders in Washington are very good often at putting out statements about how disappointed they are in President Trump.

And then it's the question of, well, where do you go from there?

The reason why I bring it up is we are so far focused in this conversation, and I think in most of these conversations about impeachment, on what the Democrats will do, what Nancy Pelosi has to say about this, what the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have to say about it.

Should this conversation actually be more focused on the Republicans and on the Republican read, on

the Mueller report and on the impeachment question overall?

So I think that Romney's statement helpfully puts us in the same direction that Ezra has pointed us, which is that the fundamental questions about Donald Trump have more to do with his basic fitness for the office he holds than with specific violations.

Unfortunately, a majority of the House and a plurality of the Senate are lawyers, and they tend to think of this as sort of a criminal process, which is one that they're familiar with.

But that's really not what impeachment is.

It's a judgment rendered by Congress on the President's fitness for office.

And I think that Romney points us to an interesting truth, which is that many Republican senators don't believe the president is fit for the office that he holds.

They're also incredibly disinclined to do anything about it.

I mean, this is something that comes up often in conversations that I have off the record with Republicans in Congress, that maybe the two of you have had too, where they say that.

They say, I don't like him and I can't stand him,

but what do you want me to do, basically?

So let's go back to Johnson here, because I think Ezra is making an interesting point when he goes back to these historical examples.

With Johnson, it's not that the hearings really surfaced new allegations of misconduct.

Really, what...

pushes that situation to an open confrontation and moves the Senate toward removal is a power struggle between Johnson and Congress, where Congress is trying to pass laws and for the first time in American history overrides a substantive veto.

It tries to get the president to enforce the laws that it has passed.

It is repeatedly frustrated in that endeavor.

The president starts firing people who are abiding by the laws that Congress passes, and Congress moves to protect officeholders who are enacting the law.

It is a power confrontation between two branches of government that convinces many legislators that they can't just wait this one out anymore.

If you're wondering what the revelation is that could actually move Republicans in the Senate, it probably isn't anything to do with President Trump's conduct behind closed doors in the White House.

My own readout,

having talked to Republicans on the Hill and to those in their orbit, is that it is more these kinds of considerations, whether on foreign policy, whether in open defiance of Congress, whether in obstruction of congressional investigations, that there is a possibility that some of these folks hold out, that the president could do things in his office which convince them that they can't afford to just ride out the storm.

That's where most Republican members of Congress are on this president.

There are some adamant supporters.

Many more have sort of battened down the hatches, determined to ride out the Trump presidency and then to try to return to the course they were steering on beforehand.

And so maybe the greatest threat to this president is his own impulsivity and anger, his own inability to restrain his impulses, his own inability to share power with Congress, to regard his role as chief executive as executing the laws that Congress has passed as opposed to acting in peremptory fashion.

Usually where we've seen Republicans actively rebuke the president, it's where he's issued an executive order or taken some other act that they believe impinges on their own rights and responsibilities, and that's the moment at which they actively push back, whether it's anything from tariffs to immigration.

But if there is some revelation which actually does substantively move to the Senate, it's not going to be a private act that Trump has committed so much as his public conduct.

All right.

Given everything that we've discussed, and I think, Yoni, even as an I'll call you an impeachment idealist, you call yourself an impeachment realist, it does not seem like we are going to get to impeachment here at the immediate, right?

That Nancy Pelosi is pushing back on this, the goalposts have moved.

It used to be, let's wait to see what's in the Mueller report.

Now it's, well, let's see what more we can get out of the Mueller report.

We don't have a lot of push from any Democratic leaders to move on impeachment outside of someone like Tom Steyer pushing for it and the advertising that he's doing.

And and of course Elizabeth Warren staking out her position on it.

So what would each of you like to see happen now to deal with what we've got?

Is there any kind of an intermediate solution to the problem that you see out there

because we're not going to get impeachments, which is what, I guess, in different ways either of you would want if the world were kind of aligned a little bit differently?

So I actually think that I would like a process that is not dissimilar from the the one Yoni is speaking about, a process that is very carefully conducted, very carefully constructed, that is very oriented towards fact-finding and public attention,

and is done through congressional hearings with a kind of open option on impeachment.

So I think this is more or less what Pelosi has been speaking about, and I think she is more or less right on it.

But I think that the House should take it as a core constitutional responsibility to build on the Mueller report, to see the Mueller report as a referral for continued investigation, for a hearing, for subpoenas, for people to come in and testify.

And I think you use that as an effort to build public support.

That public support can end up channeling into different directions depending on how long things take and where they put you and what you actually find out.

I think it is important to keep focus on these issues, but I think for now, the right thing to do is have focus on the behavior, on what is revealed in the Mueller report, and on what you can find out about that.

And then you can take that and use it to channel into other forms of accountability.

I think the mistake would be to have the process seem non-credible, to have it be done incautiously, or to have it just become, to the extent you can avoid this, a partisan circus where it's clear that you're just trying to get to the answer or having sort of the Elizabeth Warren like three-day impeachment run.

I think that you need to do sort of what she's talking about and build support, but also build the public record and build public knowledge over this.

And the sort of one-day release of the Mueller report was not enough to do that.

I think that Ezra and I are in almost absolute alignment as to the kind of process we'd like to see unfold.

He's skeptical that impeachment could actually take place and deliver this.

I tend to think that it's the only way to do this.

We're already discovering that the Trump White House is going to absolutely stonewall any attempt at congressional investigation.

It's going to deny witnesses, it's going to refuse to produce documents.

This stuff is going to get litigated, and the hope clearly is to run out the clock plus 2020.

I don't think that an ordinary process of congressional hearings is going to deliver the kind of orderly evidence-based process that we require.

I think only a process with the threat of impeachment looming over it in the background is likely to compel that sort of compliance.

It focuses the mind wonderfully to realize that the one can be removed from office.

It has in the past, and it could this time as well.

And so while I think we both want the same kind of process to unfold, perhaps where we part is that

if Ezra thinks that impeachment inquiries are the least likely way to actually produce that kind of process, I tend to think that it is the Democrats' best chance of delivering to the country what it deserves.

Well, I have a feeling that this debate is going to continue playing out not only in the world at large, but in both of your writings and in your Twitter accounts as well.

So

Ezra Klein, Yoni Applebam, thanks for joining us this week on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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