Since the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump in December, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been caught in a quandary that’s been in the making for several months. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statements are to be taken at face value, then there will be no impartiality in Trump’s Senate trial. Despite the oath to be impartial that Senators will take before the trial begins, McConnell has boasted that he is “not an impartial juror.” There’s more: he’s said that “there will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”
In response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held off on formally presenting the two articles of impeachment to the Senate until this week. This appears to be classic Pelosi: strategic and shrewd. Firstly, because, in the face of a Senate trial favoring Trump, it makes sense to delay its occurrence. Why? Because more evidence is coming out which might influence public opinion which could pressure the Senate into upholding their oath to run an impartial trial. This isn’t restricted to the Ukraine question that the impeachment articles center around, it can be any ongoing issue that affects public opinion. A big “for example” is Trump’s the recent decision to kill Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani that has resulted in fears of what would be devastating war in the Middle East. This has won Trump not only criticism from Congressional Democrats but also Republicans, who have struggled to defend this reckless action.
While public opinion is mostly divided along partisan lines, there are still moderate Republicans and independents who will play a critical role in November’s vote. As they become less enamored with Trump, this puts pressure on Republican Senators in moderate districts, making their eventual vote to remove him from office or (most likely) not a politically risky one.
Further, Pelosi has been using this as leverage to get the Senate to vote on the United States–Mexico–Canada Trade Agreement and also a prescription drug bill. Time has been on Pelosi’s side and this delay was deeply frustrating both McConnell and Trump. McConnell wants to rush the trial to an acquittal as soon as possible and Trump wants to start touting another exoneration.
Yet on Wednesday, the House of Representatives finally held a formal vote to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate and approved the seven impeachment managers chosen by Pelosi. That afternoon, the House held what’s called an engrossment ceremony, which is an arcane Congressional procedure used for making something passed by the House even more official. Then, this group of seven impeachment managers walked across the Capitol to deliver the charges to the Senate.
This all begs the question: what was the point of impeaching Trump if there is little to no chance of there being an impartial trial in the Senate or, more significantly, his removal from office?
There are two interrelated reasons why an impeachment by the House is important even if Trump is not removed from office. One is institutional, it’s about upholding the constitution and the checks and balances it set out in for the U.S. government. The U.S. presidency is powerful and has especially been endowed with more and more power when it comes to foreign policy. But the president is just that, a president and not a king and the constitution set out a series of checks and balances so that no one institution would be all-powerful. More specifically, it is the duty of the House of Representatives to hold investigations into any possible abuse of power or criminal conduct of any officials.
Not doing so would be a gross negligence and it could be argued that impeachment investigations should have begun quite a while ago. Trump has an endless list of possibly impeachable offenses, especially in relation to Russia’s election interference. However, a Republican controlled House wasn’t going to run an impeachment investigation of their own president. Calls for impeachment become louder as soon as the Democrats came to power in January of 2019, but Pelosi, again, ever strategic, held off until she found the right case.
The Ukraine incident was ideal because it’s pretty easy to understand and in fact, both Republicans and Democrats agree on what happened. It’s all in that very damning White House memo of the call between Trump and Ukrainian president on July 25th. It’s easy to understand how withholding congressionally approved military aid to any ally in exchange for a favor that might help the president’s own re-election campaign is an abuse of power, the first article of impeachment. It’s also not to hard to understand the second article, that of obstruction of Congress, because the president refused to comply with the investigation subpoenas.
While Republicans agree with the facts of what happened between Trump and Ukraine, they do not (or at least say they do no) believe that it constitutes an impeachable offense. The constitution is not terribly clear about what constitutes the impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
All of these institutional procedures and the upholding constitutional checks and balances has a second important effect. By doing their duty, the House of Representatives helps restore a sense of renewed faith in the country’s ideals. This might be highly symbolic, but this is the stuff of democracy: shared values that are upheld by institutions. Brenda Wineapple, the author of The Impeachers: the Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, wrote that impeachment is a “form of hope.” And it certainly might be, although more for Democrats than for Republicans at this point in time. But there is a long future ahead of us in which whether or not the constitution was upheld in this moment in time will matter a great deal. What happens now will set the course for what happens next for America’s democracy.
This op-ed was published in Spanish in El Español.