The Best Case For Impeachment
By 
Democratic leadership seems bent on working around this—as if the solution to entrenched minority rule is simply to try to gather an even bigger majority, but to do it without antagonizing the minority. Impeachment, in this view, would simply rouse the president’s supporters, especially after the Senate, under Mitch McConnell’s withered and unbending hand, refuses to convict.
And it might, theoretically. But so might non-impeachment. Either strategy, in turn, might rouse or depress the majority that is against the president. Either one could cause the press to rise to the scent of blood, or to sink back and defer judgment, treating the whole debacle as a campaign issue and presuming the voters will decide.
No static solution can resolve a dynamic crisis. An unstable president and a destabilized administration are not going to pull themselves together and wait for the final judgment to be rendered at the polls. The president will keep on pushing his luck and pushing the limits, whether the opposition tries to push back or not. We have never seen what happens when a president refuses to back down. There are no useful precedents for this situation, and no pragmatic rules about the safest way to play it.
I’m not against impeachment, exactly. My main issues with a lot of the discourse around it are:
–Many of its advocates are overconfident that the politics of impeachment will be a net positive.
–Many of its advocates are greatly overselling the material impact of impeachment on Trump’s power specifically and presidential power more generally, given that a Royals/Marlins World Series is more likely that 2/3rds of the Senate voting to remove Trump from office.
The best counter to his, I think, is that the political effects of impeachment cannot be meaningfully evaluated, so the only question is whether Trump should be impeached on the merits (which he obviously should.) The Dems impeach him, fine, and let’s hope it works out.
I’m still not going to be particularly upset if Trump isn’t impeached. I do think that if it happens impeachment-without-conviction is going to prove anticlimatic at best to a lot of people who now think it will be a thrilling blow to power, and there’s no question for that a subset of this faction Murc’s Law will go into full effect. But if House Dems choose to impeach Trump, also fine. One benefit of negative polarization is that the downside of taking political risks is inherently limited.