The House of Representatives is poised to impeach Donald Trump this week, and he deserves it.
But it’s still the wrong thing to do. A rushed impeachment twists the rule of law even as it seeks to uphold it. It reduces the chance of a real, bipartisan reckoning with the Trump catastrophe. And it hands over a mess to President Joe Biden when the country needs his leadership on the pandemic and many other more pressing matters.
The right answer is censure. It now stands little chance of happening, given Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition. And it’s true that censure doesn’t have the public weight or consequences of impeachment. But Pelosi is wrong that it is an “abdication.” On the contrary, censure is the legally, constitutionally, and democratically appropriate response to these outrages, given that a new president will be sworn in within eight days in any case.
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Impeachment is meant, constitutionally, to be a check on the president’s power, and to provide for his removal in case of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Days before an inauguration, this purpose cannot be achieved. “We should not allow him to menace the security of our country for a second longer,” writes one of the authors of the currently pending article of impeachment, Rep. David Cicilline. And I, for one, agree.
But Cicilline knows full well that this will not happen. The Senate cannot conduct a trial in time for Trump’s removal, even if outgoing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to do so. As such, the impeachment proceedings will simply be a kind of show trial, a mockery of congressional procedure and good governance.
There’s no time for committee deliberation—it’s not constitutionally required, as Rep. Jerrold Nadler has observed, but it is a longstanding custom dating back decades. There’s little time for deliberation of any kind, in fact. At precisely the moment when we need Congress to reassert its legitimacy as a deliberative body, a rushed article of impeachment undermines it. The House is acting in the heat of the moment, full of justified outrage, but without the kind of careful deliberation and judgment that America desperately needs.
Were a Senate trial to somehow happen before January 20, it would be a mockery of justice. An article of impeachment is meant to function as a criminal charge; it must be specific, narrow, and subject to legal process. As with the last Trump impeachment, its specific allegations are to be proven or disproven, as in a court of law. As we saw a year ago, it is a serious thing to debate whether a presidential act constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and that takes preparation, deliberation, and discussion.
None of that could happen now. If somehow the Senate took up the article of incorporation this week, it could only make a mockery of the entire process. It would be a legal process that’s been MacGyvered and scotch-taped together in order to express rage. Though it’s a far cry from storming the Capitol, it is a further disrespect of our democratic institutions.
And were a Senate trial to take place after January 20, it would be even worse for our country. While the United States will be reckoning with January 6 for years to come, we also, in the words of President Clinton’s defenders in 1998, need to move on. The COVID-19 pandemic is set to get even worse before it gets better, with the more contagious strain of the virus having just been found a few miles from my home. The incoming president and Congress face an arduous process of undoing the destruction of our democratic institutions. There is so, so much work to be done.
Now is not the moment to kneecap the incoming Biden administration with a distracting, divisive trial of an ex-president, either on January 21 or, as some have suggested, 100 days later. This is not because we need “healing,” as some self-serving Republicans have disingenuously pleaded; we also need accountability and justice. But a Senate show trial in the spring of 2021—which, were it taking place in any court, would be dismissed as moot—will not achieve those objectives.
Censure is a far better way to do so.
A censure vote would hold Trump accountable, first and foremost. He would be only the second American president to be censured by Congress—appropriately, the first was his professed hero, the genocidal populist Andrew Jackson. The condemnation can be swift and severe, without making a mockery of legal and congressional procedure. It is the legislatively appropriate way to express such condemnation. And because a censure vote has a higher likelihood of bipartisan support, the condemnation could be more broad and more resounding than a largely partisan impeachment.
But a censure vote would also hold accountable those who vote against it. The unprecedented events of last week have caused an earthquake in American politics that we do not yet understand. Now is the time to stand up and be counted. A censure debate, unlike an impeachment resolution, would force politicians to either overcome their fear of Trump’s rabid base, or pander to it and be held publicly accountable.
There are, after all, numerous ways one might defend a vote against impeachment. But censure? Surely, inciting a riot that could easily have led to the mass murder of members of Congress is deserving of that. A censure vote, unlike an impeachment vote, forces the rats to come out of their holes and show themselves in the light of day.
That’s especially true because an expressive censure resolution, unlike an legalistic article of impeachment, can be broader and encompass more of Trump’s outrageous misdeeds. If properly constructed, censure could attract broad, bipartisan support, and force those who oppose it to go on record saying there’s nothing deserving of censure here.
Again, none of this is to deny that Trump’s seditious actions merit impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. But since that cannot happen in an orderly, lawful way because of timing, the question is whether the benefits of a rushed, symbolic, practically meaningless impeachment outweigh the costs. I believe they do not.
