Impeachment remains Republicans’ best outcome
The news that Mitch McConnell privately welcomes the impeachment of Donald Trump is no more surprising than Mike Pence declining to activate the 25th Amendment to remove the President. Both stories broke on Tuesday night and their contradictory tones appear to reflect the contradictory nature of the current Republican Party.
On the one side, we have McConnell, an accomplished political player who understands the pragmatic nature of two-party politics and recognises the danger that Trump poses to the GOP. On the other, we have Pence who knows what it means to stay loyal to a single worldview. The developing story is one about a party learning to navigate between those twin poles of attraction: the hard politics of power in America and the opinion of voters obsessed with strict party loyalty. It appears to ask that huge existential question of Republicans. Which do they cherish the most: power or partisanship?
Senate Majority Leader McConnell has understandably become a hate figure to the American Left, who have viewed his control of the upper chamber as shameless, which, of course, it has been. Yet it has also been calculated to maximise the power afforded to Republicans, especially once the House turned blue after the 2018 midterms. For all the failures of the Trump years, whatever success he boasts is largely down to McConnell, especially around the number of conservative appointments made to federal courts. Trump takes the plaudits whilst McConnell quietly goes about the politics: this is very much the recent story of Washington D.C.
Yet it was always a symbiotic relationship, more convenient than convincing. As much as Donald Trump saw the GOP as a route to the presidency, it was McConnell and the GOP who found in Trump a means to align themselves with a very voguish populism that could return them to power. It probably surprised them, as it surprised everybody, how voters bought into the Trump brand, yet the story was as old as humanity itself. It was old fashioned demagoguery rooted in the identity of one man who claimed to know all the answers.
This is why a rather unaccomplished and unpopular governor proved such an inspired choice of running mate. Mike Pence’s personality was so small that it allowed Trump to maximise his, thereby dominating both the ticket and the presidency. Pence offered no vision, no ideas of his own, but he did offer ideological respectability that Trump was lacking. Pence was the committed ideologue. He was the faithful zealot for whom fate would reserve a cruel role when it asked this deeply religious man to align himself with the irreligious Trump. Yet align himself he did.
Late-night talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel, would subsequently brand Pence the “Vice Poodle” and the title certainly suited the man who had been turning obsequiousness into an Olympic sport until he was asked to formalise the big lie of Trump’s election victory. Perhaps it was simply desperation or the years of loyal service that led Trump to misread his deputy so badly, asking him to do something that was beyond his power. The New York Times reports that Trump told Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Pence’s decision was arguably both or neither.
The House voted on Tuesday to ask the Vice President to use the 25th Amendment to remove the President from office, threatening impeachment if he refused. Long before the vote was counted, Pence had already written to Pelosi to explain his position. “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with the Constitution,” he wrote.
What he failed to mention is that it is also not in the best interests of the Republican Party.
Herein lies the twist in the tale. Pence’s reply either sounds like that of a strict constitutionalist who proved a patriot when it mattered the most or it sounds like the wimpish choice made by a Vice President who remained loyal to his President to the very last. Yet there is another possibility that Trump didn’t consider in his vulgar binary system.
Pence, reportedly furious at Trump’s betrayal after the President sent his mob to Capitol Hill, has now refused Trump a path towards continued relevance. He and McConnell might be sounding contradictory notes but they appear to be reaching the same conclusion. If Trump had been forced out of office (and assuming Pelosi remained true to her word), then the President could have escaped impeachment and would not have been declared ineligible for future office. That outcome would be the worst possible outcome for Republicans who would then face four years with the wrongly ousted President scalping donors ahead of a possible re-election campaign. Every ambitious candidate would then be measured against Trump, with many promising careers broken on the back of Trump’s name-calling and malice.
So long as Trump remains stubbornly in office, however, Republicans can still pin their hopes on the impeachment process. Pence’s decision makes that more likely and McConnell has already said that any trial in the Senate would take place after Biden’s inauguration. That would give him plausible deniability, even though Trump’s terminal demise would be a result better than he, Pence, or the Republicans deserve. It will suit others, meanwhile, to follow the path now made acceptable by Liz Cheney (the third most powerful Republican in the House), by opposing Trump, but that feels more like positioning ahead of the schism that will surely affect the GOP post Trump. How that “betrayal” might be viewed by the wider Republican caucus remains to be seen. Talk of the party splitting is probably hyperbolic for the moment, but then, so too is any argument that suggests that peace will break out given two very disparate brands of Republicanism with the GOP.
That fight between traditional Republicans and the Trumpish rump is, however, for another day. As it stands, Republicans now need the Democrats to rid them of Trump ahead of 2024.
It continues to make one wonder why on earth the Democrats would want to oblige.