THE POLITICAL SCENETHE IMPEACHMENT WAR
Can a grassroots movement throw Trump out of oice, or will it backre?
BY JEFFREY TOOBINA
l Green cuts a distinctive figure
around the Capitol. He is, for
starters, the only male member
of the House of Representatives with a
ponytail. He expresses himself with a
kind of baroque humility; to the ques-
tion “How are you?” he invariably re-
sponds, “Better than I deserve.” (Elab-
orating, if asked, he says that he is a
“recovering sinner.”) He is unusual, too,
because, while most politicians call at-
tention to their triumphs and hide their
failures, Green reserves a place of honor
in his congressional oice for two re-
minders of crushing, if perhaps tempo-
rary, legislative defeats. Last year, Green—
who, since 2005, has represented a district
centered on Houston—sponsored the
first vote in the House of Representa-
tives on the impeachment of President
Donald Trump. On December 6th, the
House rejected Green’s initiative to bring
impeachment up for debate by a vote of
364–58. The following month, the House
rejected a similar attempt by Green, this
time by a vote of 355–66.
Notwithstanding the lopsided re-
sults, Green has placed copies of each
of the resolutions in portfolios embossed
with the gold seal of the House. The
December resolution is paired with a
list of the members who voted for it—
they are called “THE FIRST 58.” The Jan-
uary resolution faces a page containing
the names of its supporters, who are
called “THE HISTORIC 66.” Green sent
identical copies of the portfolios to all
the congressmen who voted with him.
Green, a Democrat, never supported
Trump, although he also never imag-
ined that he would be advocating his
forced removal from oice. “I didn’t come
to Congress to impeach a President,” he
told me. “I came to Congress to nego-
tiate the issues that I grew up with—
poverty, housing—for the least, the last,
and the lost.” But Green began contem-
plating Trump’s removal when the Pres-
ident fired James Comey, the F.B.I. di-
rector, in May, 2017. Three months later,
when Trump equated white-supremacist
protesters in Charlottesville with those
who had rallied against them, Green
decided to take formal action: “That’s
when I realized he was unfit to be Pres-
ident. He was converting his bigotry
into American policy.” When the reso-
lution came up for a vote, he said, “I did
not lobby anyone, because, quite frankly,
it’s a question of conscience.” He pressed
for the second vote after Trump referred
to Haiti and other predominantly black
nations as “shithole countries.” Green
understood that his call for impeach-
ment was symbolic, but he expressed
satisfaction with the number of votes he
received—nearly a third of the Demo-
cratic members of the House. “I con-
cluded if but one person voted for this
article, this would be the right thing,”
he said. “And we are not finished.”T
oday, the impeachment of Donald
Trump exists on the brink of plau-
sibility. The sine qua non of an impeach-
ment investigation, to say nothing of
actual votes to charge and remove the
President, is a Democratic takeover of
the House in the November elections.
Such a change now looks better than
possible, maybe even probable. At the
same time, the President appears to be
in ever-greater legal peril from dual in-
vestigations, one led by Robert Muel-
ler, the special counsel, and the other
by federal prosecutors in New York. In
April, F.B.I. agents raided the oices of
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime law-
yer and fixer, and removed telephones
and business records. Cohen has not
been charged with a crime, but the pros-
pect of a case against him, with the
chance that he might plead guilty and
reveal everything he knows, represents
a substantial risk for the President. In
Washington, Michael Flynn, Trump’s
former national-security adviser, and
Rick Gates, who worked on Trump’scampaign and in his White House, have
both already pleaded guilty to charges
brought by Mueller and agreed to
coöperate with his investigation. The
full extent of Mueller’s findings is not
known, raising the possibility that more
legal and political damage to the Pres-
ident is yet to come. While Rudolph
Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, may or may
not be correct that Mueller believes he
lacks the legal authority to indict the
President, the possibility of impeach-
ment clearly exists—if Congress has the
evidence, and the will, to proceed.
Trump supporters seem to welcome
a fight over the issue. “If the Demo-
crats move for impeachment, I think
they are playing right into the hands of
the President,” Anthony Scaramucci,
Trump’s former White House commu-
nications director, told me. “He doesn’t
have Richard Nixon’s attention span or
his O.C.D. about record-keeping. There
are no e-mails or tapes. He didn’t do
anything wrong on Russia, so he’ll be
exonerated.” Scaramucci added, “You
are dealing with a human Pac-Man.
He’s the toughest son of a bitch I’ve
ever met in my life.” Christopher Ruddy,
the chief executive of the Newsmax
Web site, who sees the President reg-
ularly at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach,
told me, “The guy loves a fight and will
see this one as easily winnable.” Repub-
licans believe a push for impeachment
would likely be a disaster for the Dem-
ocrats in the midterms. Steve Bannon,
Trump’s former top strategist, told me,
“Anger and fear drive of-year elections,
and we are going to talk about how the
Democrats want to shut us up by im-
peaching Trump when they couldn’t
beat him in 2016. People are talking
about the Republicans losing forty seats
in the House, but if we make the elec-
tion a referendum on impeachment we
could break even or pick up a few.”
Opposition to impeachment seems
to be a rare point of agreement between