Earlier this week, a joke went viral on Twitter. “It’s been 6 months since I joined the gym and no progress,” wrote Tony Starch. “I’m going there in person tomorrow to see what’s really going on.” Something similar might be said about the Republican party’s attitude to the impeachment of Donald Trump. After months of deliberately trying to ignore, frustrate, or sabotage the process, they now complain that it is a travesty.
If nothing else, the Democrats’ cautious progress has shown that justice deferred is not necessarily justice denied. Pelosi’s delayed transmission of the articles was widely questioned, even mocked, by political opponents, but it has allowed a flood of damning new evidence to emerge. Republicans who downplayed the gravity of the charges against Trump a month ago must now regret that they couldn’t forestall the latest embarrassments with a snap trial in December.
Yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times reviews some of the more damaging revelations from the last four weeks. Evidence that a US ambassador “was surveilled and possibly targeted for harm by people directly connected to Trump aides”; that Russians hacked Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company at the centre of the inquiry; that Trump “personally directed the scheme to gather Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden”, and “personally ordered the hold on the Ukraine aid, [90 minutes the incriminating phone call] even though top White House officials disagreed over the wisdom and legality of that move.”
The Republican-controlled Senate is reluctant to permit further evidence into the trial and GOP leaders seem determined to rush towards a partisan vote that will exculpate the president, at least at an institutional level. But with the political drama only in its second act, nobody can predict the plot twists ahead. A trial that ends with a nakedly political acquittal will produce a backlash in the elections, but one that dwells too long on Trump’s many dysfunctions could prove equally damaging. The party thus finds itself at a crossroads, forced to weigh the national interest against its habitual defence of an ungrateful, vindictive and apparently corrupt leader.
In one sense impeachment has worked perfectly by letting Congress hold the president accountable as far as the system will allow. But it can also be seen as an indulgence, an act of political theatre that is unlikely to unseat its target. To some extent the two perspectives converge in current American politics, especially in the reality show presidency of Donald Trump.
In 1995 Chief Justice William Rehnquist surprised his colleagues by donning a robe with four gold stripes on each sleeve. The Court’s public information office later explained that Rehnquist had designed the garment in homage to “the Lord Chancellor in a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Iolanthe,’ and he intended to keep on wearing it.” Rehnquist kept the robe throughout the Clinton impeachment trial, partly as a sly comment on the histrionic self-righteousness which those proceedings elicited. Chief Justice Roberts has a different sense of humour, which may prove useful because he faces what is essentially the opposite problem. He will presently preside over a trial in which more than half of the jury seem determined to treat the transgressions as little more than a comic opera. His legacy, and theirs, will ultimately depend on whether he can get them to show up in person rather than just sign up for something they don’t intend to pursue.
