Trump’s followers and the leadership of
the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, the
Democratic leader in the House, told
me, “I don’t like to talk about impeach-
ment.” She explained, “Impeachment is
not a political tool. It has to be based
on just the law and the facts. When I
was Speaker, people wanted me to im-
peach George Bush for the war in Iraq
because it was based on false informa-
tion, but you can’t just go from one
impeachment to the next. When we are
in the majority, we are going to try to
be unifying, and there is no way to do
impeachment in a bipartisan way right
now.” The numbers back up Pelosi’s
wariness. According to a Quinnipiac
University poll taken in April, fifty-two
per cent of American voters oppose im-
peachment. Another poll from around
the same time reported that forty-seven
per cent would definitely vote against
a candidate who wanted to remove
Trump from oice. (In a sign of how
divided the country is, forty-two per
cent would definitely vote for a candi-
date who made such a promise.)
Still, a powerful grassroots move-
ment has formed in support of im-
peachment, a political cousin of sorts
to the recent pushes for women’s rights
and gun control. According to Quin-
nipiac, seventy-one per cent of Dem-
ocrats already favor impeachment. To
proponents, a nearly fifty-fifty split
among the voting public at this early
date, before Mueller has reported his
findings, is significant. In primaries for
the 2018 elections, some prominent
Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom,
the lieutenant governor of California,
who is running for governor, made sup-
port for impeachment a major part of
their platforms. Tom Steyer, a San Fran-
cisco billionaire, has since last year been
running television advertisements sup-
porting impeachment, and has gener-
ated a mailing list of more than 5.2 mil-
lion people. Steyer is now on a thirty-city
speaking tour. For the moment, he and
his followers are outcasts from the
Washington consensus. But their pas-
sion, and the mounting evidence against
the President, raises the question of
whether the drive for impeachment is
more likely to result in Trump’s removal
from oice or in a Democratic civil war.F
or roughly the first two centuries
of the American republic, there was
an informal taboo on advocating for
impeachment, even among a President’s
most outspoken critics. Only one Pres-
idential impeachment proceeding oc-
curred during this period: in 1868, An-
drew Johnson was impeached by the
House but remained in oice after being
acquitted in the Senate by a single vote.
The nominal ground for impeachment
involved his dismissal of a member of
his Cabinet, but impeachment cases are
always about the politics of the mo-ment as much as the evidence before
Congress. Johnson’s case represented a
final act of the Civil War. Though he
was Abraham Lincoln’s Vice-President
and successor, Johnson was a Demo-
crat, and he resisted the Republican Re-
construction in the South. Republicans
used impeachment as a form of revenge,
which only reinforced the taboo.
Today, that taboo has faded. An in-
vestigation of Trump would follow
Richard Nixon’s forced resignation, on
the brink of impeachment, in 1974, and
Bill Clinton’s impeachment and acquit-
tal, in 1998-99. “The reason we are see-
ing more demands for impeachment is
the rise in partisanship. Our partisan
divisions now are not just sharp but
among the sharpest in American his-
tory,” Michael Gerhardt, a professor at
the University of North Carolina School
of Law and the author of “The Federal
Impeachment Process,” the leading trea-
tise on the subject, said. “These divi-
sions are then taken out on the Presi-
dent with calls for impeachment, which
is an extreme measure and appeals to
people who have extreme positions.”
In Congress, there’s a surprisingly
vigorous impeachment lobby expand-
ing on the work that Al Green began.
Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Ten-
nessee and the ranking member of the
Constitution and Civil Justice subcom-
mittee of the House Judiciary Com-
mittee, has fleshed Green’s bare-bones
proposal out into a full impeachment
resolution. Cohen’s indictment has five
counts. The first charges Trump with
obstruction of justice, based largely on
Comey’s account of how the President
tried to restrain the Russia investiga-
tion and then fired Comey when he
would not oblige. The second count,
referring to Trump’s business interests,
including his hotels, asserts that he vi-
olated the foreign-emoluments clause
of the Constitution, which bars federal
oiceholders from receiving payments
from foreign governments. In a similar
vein, the third count asserts that Trump
directed federal money to his businesses
and hotels domestically. The fourth
count charges him with abuse of power
for his criticisms of federal judges and
for his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the for-
mer sherif of Maricopa County, in Ar-
izona. The final count claims that Trump
undermined the First Amendment by“My wife! Her new husband!”••