“A way of seeing is a way of not seeing.”
-Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization
On Wednesday, the 45th president of United States, Donald J. Trump, was impeached by the House of Representatives. He was only the third president to be impeached in U.S. history. Andrew Johnson was impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached. Richard Nixon was not impeached. He escaped this indignity by resigning from office.
At the moment, Democrats are jubilant. They impeached a truly hated enemy. While they know that there’s a greater chance that Hillary Clinton will be elected as a Republican in 2020 than that Donald Trump will be removed by the Senate, they pressed the case for impeachment anyway. Why did they do it?
On one level, impeachment was a moment of catharsis for those still trying to reconcile themselves to Trump’s 2016 surprise victory. The resistance was calling for impeachment before they had any specific accusation with which to charge him. For many Democrats, impeachment was a solution looking for a problem.
When the Russian probe failed to lead to impeachment, they were almost as disappointed as they were with the election results. With the Ukrainian phone call, they built a platform on which they believed they could hang the president. In fairness, Trump’s less-than-perfect choice of words gave them the ability to construct the scaffold. Never mind its shoddy construction.
The impeachment case rests on the interpretation of a few ambiguous words in Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President-elect Zelenskyy. While conservatives generally believe that Trump was less than clear, the Democrats saw a smoking gun. Yet this is only a smoking gun if you believe that Trump really is a nefarious plutocrat who just keeps getting away with repeated acts of treason. Short of such a worldview, the entire thing appears petty and vindictive, which is just what recent polls are telling us.
Then why would the Democrats press the case? They had to know that they would not actually remove the president. They knew that Republicans wouldn’t vote for impeachment without clear and overwhelming evidence—the type of evidence that leads to a public outcry. They knew that Republicans in the Senate enjoy a 53-47 majority and that the Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to remove the president. Donald Trump’s forthcoming acquittal was preordained.
However, the Democrats are looking beyond the present. Their time horizon extends into the next election. They appear to believe that their standard-bearer will have a tremendous advantage by running against an impeached president.
Unfortunately, they are not looking far enough into the future. Politics blinds us to other realities and the Democrats’ victory in the House on Wednesday, December 18th will prove to be a pyrrhic victory. It is also a failure of leadership. When you remove the political lens for a moment and consider the long-term implications, Democrats should be far less enthusiastic. Just consider a few thoughts.
First, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Donald J. Trump actually is corrupt. Why would House Democrats pursue a strategy that they know will ultimately lead to exoneration? Why pursue this flimsy charge if solid evidence exists? It is like settling for reckless driving when they should be charging him with murder.
Now follow this line of reasoning. What will happen the next time that Trump places personal gain over his oath to defend the Constitution? Doesn’t “getting away with it” only emboldened bad men? Haven’t they just made him stronger? Would a jaded public be willing to put up with a second impeachment? How about a third?
Impeachment was supposed to be the final remedy for truly bad behavior, not a common procedure to neutralize a political opponent. The Founders’ two-thirds rule for removal was designed to ensure that any offense would be severe enough to convince a supermajority of the need to remove the president. They feared that impeachment might be used for political purposes, but they never thought anyone would seek impeachment without removal in order to publicly shame their opponent.
The Democrats have spent their political capital knowing that they would not remove the president. They only hoped to cripple him before the next election. That is the great innovation here.
This leads us to the second problem. Bill Clinton was impeached only twenty years ago and Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump’s impeachment appears to be at least partially motivated by retribution.
In addition, the proceedings were hyper-partisan. When Bill Clinton perjured himself in 1998, the evidence was clear and 31 Democrats voted with the Republicans to impeach. Though the Senate trial failed, Clinton actually broke the law and impeachment was brought forward with bi-partisan support. This was not the case on Wednesday.
In Trump’s case, the evidence depends on interpretation, and the vote was strictly along party lines. A few Democrats voted with the Republicans. One Democrat voted present. Zero Republicans voted to impeach. What do Democrats expect will happen when the trial goes to the Senate? When one party cannot convince a single member of the other party to vote for either charge, is it more likely that not a single Republican has a conscience or shall we conclude that the evidence is weak?
The real difficulty here is the precedent that this impeachment sets. Politicized impeachments invite retaliation. What will happen the next time that one party controls the White House while the other party controls Congress? A tool that is been used once per century has now been employed twice in twenty years. It’s not much of a stretch to believe that we will see many more politically-weaponized impeachments in future decades.
Finally, what we witnessed through this impeachment process was nothing more than one party exercising raw political power to trample the other and we will soon see the other party reply in kind.
Power invites retribution. Leadership builds bridges. It brings people together. It solves problems. This impeachment was not leadership, but a failure of leadership. It was an exercise in brute force when the goal should be winning hearts and minds. The unintended consequences of present actions will reverberate into the future. Historians will reflect on this moment is a loss of innocence for the American political system. It was a time where a tool intended as the final defense against tyrants was reimagined as a common political tactic.
Power and leadership must not be confused. Politicians that resort to brute power create cycles of dysfunction. They focus on today and ignore the long term consequences. They get their way, unconcerned that power drives out relationship, but the side effects are toxic. They trade short-term gain for durable resentment.
Leadership is marked by influence. If the Democrats were truly leading, they would have converted enough members of the other party to build a credible case of a president’s guilt in the court of public opinion. Or, they could just lead the old fashioned way—by working with the other side to accomplish mutually shared objectives.
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Dr. Darin Gerdes is a tenured Professor of Management in the College of Business at Charleston Southern University.
All ideas expressed on www.daringerdes.com are his own.
FTC Disclosure: When I refer to a book, I often add a link to Amazon (#ad) so you can purchase it easily. I may earn a few cents if you buy it, but I never recommend any books unless they are worth reading.
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