Just not worth it?

Here we are, on the eve of the second impeachment trial of our recently departed ex-president.

In anticipation, back on January 29, George Will penned a column entitled "It still doesn’t make sense to impeach and convict Donald Trump."

"Doesn't make sense" is Will's operative phrase. He argues not that Trump doesn't deserve impeachment, but that, borrowing from Nancy Pelosi in March 2019, "he's just not worth it."

Trump might not be worth it, but the country is. More on that in a moment.

Arguing at least a bit against himself, Will allows that the incitement of the January 6 Capitol riot was a "patently impeachable offense," and that it "made a second impeachment inevitable." But, he says, that does not "make it prudent."

Will argues that there are two reasons for impeaching a president: removal to prevent ongoing harm, which is now moot, and as a deterrent to future presidents. Actually there are three reasons, at least, and the third does have prudential implications.

Regarding the second reason: "Deterrence, however, presupposes rationality," Will wrote, "and perhaps a conscience, neither of which would feature in any future iteration of the 45th president."

In other words, a future president as amoral and irrational as Trump would not in any case be deterred, so why bother? This is plausible but not self-evident, and besides a future president needing to be deterred might not be so irrational.

But there is a third reason for impeachment and, I will insist, a fourth. The third reason is that an impeached and convicted president can be prohibited, as a further penalty, and by simple majority vote, from ever holding elected office again. Preempting Trump's future political possibilities once and for all seems like a good idea.

A fourth reason is to permanently register Congress's, and our, emphatic rejection of a malignantly unfit president who abused his office, harmed institutions, and attacked democracy. Which is to say, to add an indelible entry to the history books, regardless of whatever deterrent value it might or might not have, as a declaration for all time about who we are and are not. Acknowledging what we have endured compels us to render a permanent judgement apart from any incentives it might have on future politicians. And because synergies accumulate around doing what's right, we can even hope that a judgement so-recorded might incentivize society toward future self-protection, and thus fortify our resolve.

George Will writes that those who loathe Trump are "luxuriating in a vengeance disconnected from the public good," as if the loathing itself is not deeply connected to the recognition that the public good has been defiled. And further, Will notes, they are relishing the plight of Republican Senators who must serve as Trump's jurors while fearing the disapproval of their crazed constituents.

"Reasonable people, for whom seeing is believing, know what happened [on January 6], and why," Will declared, as if to suggest our present knowing without acting is sufficient: that a formal and durable defense of the ideals that are threatened by what we know is not a necessary response. Or perhaps he reckons that such a defense is not attainable through this particular constitutional remedy against this particular ex-president at this particular time.

But seeing and knowing isn't enough. And knowing without acting normalizes what we have endured. It relegates our national tribulation to the category of just another infrequently recurring and hopefully self-limiting political unpleasantry, when in truth it must be unambiguously and formally renounced as aberrant and abhorrent.

George Will rightly observes that these are crazy times, that the craziness is still very much in play on the right, and that it saturates all the right's political institutions. Establishment Republicans such as Rob Portman and Doug Ducey are getting out of the game, and the unhinged conduct of state Republican parties around the country demonstrates quite disturbingly that the fever has not nearly broken. Ducey's state party is censuring him for certifying Arizona's election results; Ben Sasse is being censured in Nebraska, and Liz Cheney in Wyoming. Similar dysfunction is roiling Georgia. And as Will notes, Oregon's Republican party actually announced that "the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump."

Maybe George Will's point is that since the derangement is so widespread and pervasive, an impeachment conviction would not enjoy the acquiescence of our deluded and delirious multitudes. It would thereby be a judgement of one political side over the other, astride a presently unbridgeable divide, thereby enfeebling its consequence and deepening divisions. Even if the side rendering the verdict is acting righteously in the name of country and sanity, the gulf between the two sides is too great for an impeachment conviction to have much positive effect.

But is that really so? And aren't all difficult and consequential times in some ways like this, where the imperative of the historical moment is to damn the torpedoes and act from principle, thereby registering—by all of us who history will subsequently (we hope) judge to have been correct—a definitive confirmation of who we are and what we are about? Don't we actually, as part of the existential covenant we assume in charting our continuing way forward, in defense of our most important institutions, and embracing the bargains and obligations of citizenship and self-rule, need to anticipate history's ultimate affirmation?

George Will might complain that I have erected a straw man regarding what he is and isn't saying. Perhaps his actual point is simpler: that conviction in the Senate is uncertain, even unlikely, and thus a legal and political acquittal will be construed as a dangerous moral acquittal and even precedent. In the Senate, Will observes, "few Republicans are willing to enrage many constituents by voting to convict [Trump] for no better reason than that he is obviously guilty as charged."

When the Senate fails to convict, what then? Wouldn't such a failure further imperil the very institutions we are trying to protect? And isn't anticipation of such endangerment an argument against provoking the fates by commencing a doomed process?

Sorry, but there is no clean, certain, and painless way forward. That being so, we may as well resolve to do what's right, and hope against hope that doing what's right represents our best chance for national redemption. Not to mention our survival as a self-governing people.

History, to whose final assessments we are not now privy, will judge the Senate's likely failure to convict in one of two ways. The first possibility is that the impeachment trial will document the final death throes of a failed political party (there have been others), and its feckless senators. In a happier future, that party might be succeeded by one that's renewed and revitalized, and ready to claim its rightful role in the national project.

The other possibility is that the failure to convict becomes a historical milepost on our road of continuing national decline. Rome had such mileposts. History knows how this turns out. We don't. 

A belated Happy New Year.

 

Copyright (C) 2021 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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