Friday Review: The Impeachment Question

Over the past year or so, the call to impeach Bush has grown increasingly mainstream and self-confident. According to this Salon article, which gives a useful recap of the movement to impeach Bush, twenty-six House Democrats, including minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, support the creation of a select committee to investigate the possibility of impeachable offenses. Bush stands accused of all kinds of high crimes and misdemeanors, such as taking the US to war on false premises, violating the constitution, and authorizing torture.

The House Judiciary Committee could probably make a pretty good case for drawing up articles of impeachment. Lying to go to war might not technically be a high crime, but unjustifiably suspending various aspects of the constitution certainly is. In certain ways, Bush has sprung his own trap. By claiming extreme times demand extraordinary powers, he indicates that he can be judged only by extraordinary measures, not normal checks and balances. Surely this is what impeachment was established for: a congressional check on executive power to be used only under the most extreme circumstances.

However, impeachment is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Some liberals, like Harold Meyerson, have argued that impeachment is imprudent right now because it’s not going to be the kind of unifying national campaign slogan that will win the Democrats the mid-term elections. It would drain too many political resources away from the campaigns themselves. Yet by this logic, it is hard to see how impeachment would be a good idea even after the mid-term elections. Just from the standpoint of the Democrats themselves, surely political capital would be better spent trying to repeal the Patriot Act, demanding the closure of Guantanamo or insisting on the withdrawal of troops, than trying to take down the President.

If we take a step back from electoral politics, we can see even more serious problems with impeachment. The fundamental problem facing American democracy, which we have discussed before, is a structural crisis, in which Congress defers and the Supreme Court acquiesces to the accumulation of powers by the Presidency. Both parties have participated in this process, and there is little reason to believe either of them will sincerely address the issue. This basic problem has been shunted to the margins of public debate, while matters of personality, specific policies, inter-party differences, or moral integrity have taken center stage. It is not that certain threats to democracy, like unconstitutional wiretapping, aren’t discussed, but that they are at most identified with a specific person (Bush) or party (Republicans). The incessant debates about these issues and the demand to ‘do something’ about them ends up reproducing the climate of crisis and immediate action that forecloses more considered political debate. Politics becomes about issue-hopping and damage-control, rather than a serious interrogation of our democracy.

In this context, impeachment easily becomes a misleading proxy for real democratic change. Putting the waste of time that was Clinton’s impeachment to one side, think of Nixon. For two years the nation was consumed in a public debate about Nixon’s shenanigans – illegal wiretapping, slush funds, blackmailing, cover-up, break-in. At the end of it, Nixon stepped down, and the Congress passed a few pieces of legislation, like the War Powers Act, which erected paper barriers against presidential powers. The final outcome was public exhaustion and cynicism with politics, and a massive expenditure of energy with no real long-term improvement in American democracy. One might say we ended up worse off, as the public was left with a vision of political institutions as irredeemably corrupt, and intractable to real democratic change.

The reason impeachment is not a powerful device of democratic change is that it is a special legal proceeding. It works according to the principle of individual responsibility. As a tactic of political change, therefore, it has the tendency to transform broad social problems into matters of individual behavior and responsibility. Legal proceedings by nature cannot directly address social forces or historical trends, and at worst can occlude them. It can give the impression of symbolic victory without substantive change, or confuse deposing an individual with political transformation.

This confusion of the person and the wider problem is already in evidence. According to the Salon article, in a town hall meeting in New York about impeachment, one of the panelists said:

““We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said, "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back.””

The move from ‘republic to tyranny’, or at least erosion of democratic liberties, has been going on for quite some time. It was not all wine and roses before Bush, and deposing Bush would put…Cheney in the helm. Or if both went, House Speaker Dennis Hastert – not exactly a champion of democracy.

The point is not merely that impeachment won’t really change things. It might even serve to redeem the very political system that we should be criticizing. Impeachment would here serve as a piece of political theater, making Congress look like it is serving its designed checking function instead of exposing both parties’ complicity.

As the Salon article quite reasonably asks:
“But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.”

In other words, what nobody has really explained is how getting rid of Bush will address the evisceration of American democracy. Impeachment does not appear to be part of any grand strategy. A strategy presumes relative clarity about first principles and fundamental problems. But if anything, at the moment, it seems to substitute action for thinking. Impeachment would signal a rehabilitation of the totally uninspiring ‘Anybody But Bush’ slogan that dominated the 2004 electoral debate on the left. Democrats hide behind the anti-Bush slogan, hoping nobody will notice that they don’t really know what they stand for.

One might argue that impeachment could acquire a dynamic of its own by bringing to the fore issues like accountability, democracy and the separation of powers. While the Democrats focused on Bush, public debate might start taking these issues more seriously, and start holding both parties to these standards. This might give impeachment some instrumental value as a strategy for improving democracy. However, we know what the public debate will be like – Did Bush lie? Did he know he lied? Does it matter if he knew he lied? Did he violate the constitution? Did he know he violated the constitution? Who told him what? Did Congress give him the power? Was it a high crime? What is a high crime and misdemeanor?

In other words, it will be as it was with Clinton and Nixon – an emphasis on technical legal issues, and personal behavior. Any attempt to leverage the impeachment debate into a broader discussion of institutional crisis and first principles faces an uphill battle. After all, it would mean trying to focus debate on precisely the kinds of social and political trends that impeachment is ill-suited to addressing. If such discussions had any impact, they would actually point away from focusing energy on mere impeachment, and therefore seem to run at cross-purposes with what’s going on at the moment. The essential problem facing our society is its unwillingness to face the long-term evisceration of democratic liberties. It is not the presence of Bush but the absence of a democratic movement that is most problematic today. By focusing on personalities, specific policies, and particular actions, impeachment is unlikely to raise, and just as likely to lower, the level of debate. Impeachment promises to be a piece of political theater, which serves no critical function.