an impeachable ofense doesn’t always
mean that you should impeach him,” he
said. I asked Nadler if he meant that the
House should impeach only if two-thirds
of the Senate was going to vote to re-
move the President. Not necessarily, he
said: “An impeachment, even if it’s not
successful in the sense of removing the
President from oice, may in fact be nec-
essary and successful at saying, in efect,
‘You have violated the constitutional
order, you are threatening the constitu-
tional order, you will stop threatening
the constitutional order. You will stop
threatening the rule of law.’ ”
Nadler was a member of the Judi-
ciary Committee during the Clinton
impeachment hearings, in 1998. He
emerged as an outspoken opponent of
impeachment, and several of the argu-
ments he deployed are eerily similar to
those which Trump’s defenders have
used. Nadler was a strident critic of
Kenneth Starr, the independent coun-
sel, and he demanded audits of what he
regarded as Starr’s excessive spending
in the course of the investigation. Nad-
ler described the case against Clinton
as based on the Republicans’ general
distaste for the President rather than
on any specific acts of wrongdoing. “It
showed that a determined majority in
the House could impeach a President
without legitimate reason,” Nadler said.
The experience also taught him that
the public can exact a cost on the party
that brings a failed or unjustified im-
peachment. The Judiciary
Committee held its im-
peachment hearings in the
weeks just before the 1998
midterms, and on Election
Day the Democrats re-
versed the usual fate of a
party in its sixth year of con-
trol of the Presidency by
gaining five seats. Nadler
said that the Republicans
“lost seats with the im-
peachment pending, and they lost seats
because people disapproved of it and
they went ahead with it anyway.”
T
he purported lessons of the Clin-
ton impeachment haunt the
Trump investigation, even though the
cast of characters in Congress has al-
most completely turned over in the
two intervening decades. Of the thirty-
seven members of the Judiciary Com-
mittee in 1998, just seven remain—four
Republicans (Bob Goodlatte, the cur-
rent chairman, Jim Sensenbrenner,
Lamar Smith, and Steve Chabot) and
three Democrats (Nadler, Sheila Jack-
son Lee, and Zoe Lofgren). Goodlatte
and Smith are retiring at the end of
their current terms. (Abbe Lowell, who
was the lead lawyer for Judiciary Com-
mittee Democrats in the Clinton in-
quiry, is now in private practice and
represents Jared Kushner, President
Trump’s son-in-law.)
The Clinton impeachment also
played a role in Nadler’s campaign, last
year, to become the ranking Democrat
on the Judiciary Committee. Demo-
crats generally choose their commit-
tee leaders based on seniority. Even
though Nadler was the longest-tenured
Democrat, he was challenged for the
leadership by Zoe Lofgren, who rep-
resents a district in Silicon Valley. Part
of Lofgren’s pitch was her experience
on the impeachment question. Not
only did Lofgren, like Nadler, serve on
the committee in 1998; she was also a
young stafer for Representative Don
Edwards in 1974, when she worked on
the impeachment proceedings against
Richard Nixon.
For Lofgren, the Nixon example
looms large. “The American people at
some kind of gut level understand the
constitutional system,” she told me.
“When a President lied about having
an afair with a young
woman, that was gross be-
havior, and the lie was argu-
ably unlawful, but it had
nothing to do with govern-
ment. With Nixon, having
an enemies list and using
the elements of the federal
government to destroy your
enemies was about the
abuse of government power.
People got that. By the time
the committee voted to impeach, in 1974,
the country was on board.” In the nine-
teen-seventies there was also a core of
moderate Republicans open to consid-
ering the evidence against Nixon. Seven
of the seventeen Republicans on the Ju-
diciary Committee voted for at least one
article of impeachment. Not a single
Democrat on the committee voted in
favor of Clinton’s impeachment.Even Republicans who voted for
Clinton’s impeachment now regard it
as, at best, a mixed success. Steve
Chabot, who represents a district in
Cincinnati, said, “If the Democrats go
in that direction, they are likely to learn
a lesson that we learned in 1998. Even
if the country starts out with you, they
get sick of the process pretty quickly.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, of South
Carolina, who was a member of the
Judiciary Committee in 1998, has an
even more negative view. “It blew up
in our faces and helped President Clin-
ton,” he said. “If Democrats keep up
what they’re doing, the whole thing
will just be shirts and skins—Demo-
crats versus Republicans—and that’s a
no-win when it comes to impeach-
ment. It has to be bipartisan, or it’s
going to be a failure.”
Indeed, the fervor for impeachment
among some on the left is nearly
matched by the passion against it on
the right—an ardor that conservatives
are more than happy to exploit, espe-
cially leading up to the midterm elec-
tions. Trump has taken up the cause,
telling a rally in Michigan, in April,
“We have to keep the House, because
if we listen to Maxine Waters she’s
going around saying, ‘We will impeach
him.’ ” (Waters, a California congress-
woman and a favorite target of Trump’s,
voted in favor of Al Green’s resolu-
tions.) Republicans in competitive
races are also raising the alarm. “There
is no doubt that impeachment will be
a critical issue in November for Dem-
ocrats and for Republicans,” Ted Cruz,
the Republican senator from Texas,
who is facing an unexpectedly serious
challenge from Beto O’Rourke, a Dem-
ocratic congressman, told me. “There
is right now enormous energy on the
far left. They hate the President. They
are consumed with Trump derange-
ment syndrome.” He continued, “For
many on the right, and many in the
middle, not having the country con-
sumed by impeachment proceedings
and not seeing us lose the progress
the country has made under President
Trump is also a powerful motivator.”
Cruz doesn’t believe Pelosi’s state-
ments that she does not currently
support impeachment. “If the Dem-
ocrats take over the House, on the day
Nancy Pelosi is sworn in to oice,