No one enjoys getting Âimpeached, and if it happens to him, President Trump will be no exception.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine any potential target of impeachment in Anglo-American history relishing the fight more than Trump would. He would rather be done with the Mueller investigation in all its permutations, but there is no one better suited to Âbeing at the center of a harshly partisan, deeply personal political and legal donnybrook that will ultimately be just for show.
Trump famously told top aides at the beginning of his administration that he wanted them to view each day as a TV episode. ÂImpeachment would be a helluva season, matching a momentous process of American government with low political melodrama.
This may feel like a devolution from the buttoned-up Mueller probe, but the House should have been the locus of the Trump Âinvestigation in the first place.
Because Justice Department policy says a president can’t be Âindicted, special counsel Robert Mueller was never going to reach a legal conclusion about alleged obstruction. The question was whether the president’s conduct constituted an abuse of power that Congress would deem impeachable; in other words, it was a political question.
Congress, then, was always the most appropriate venue for the investigation and disposition of this matter, not the office of the special counsel.
But our habit of transmuting broad political questions into narrow legal ones and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s panicked appointment of Mueller — after the firing of FBI Director James Comey that he participated in — ensconced the probe within the Department of Justice.
Instead of being out in the open, it was behind closed doors. ÂInstead of being nakedly political, it was clothed in thick legal analysis. ÂInstead of being a struggle Âbetween the branches, it was a struggle within the executive branch.
Trump was deeply conflicted. He hated the investigation and came up with schemes to crimp it, all of which came to nothing. At the same time, the White House cooperated with Mueller. It was a twilight struggle between the president and the special counsel, with Trump not able to fully fight what was, in effect, an impeachment inquiry because any wrong move would be interpreted as yet another alleged act of obstruction.
Now, the battle is truly joined. The body that is going to make the ultimate decision of what to do about Trump’s conduct, if anything, is on the hook. It has to decide what goes too far and not far enough. Should it subpoena Trump’s children? How much time should it devote to investigations as opposed to its policy agenda? And, of course, should it impeach?