What Trump did, well, okay, a president isn’t supposed to tell the head of the FBI to discontinue an investigation because the subject is a good guy who’s been through a lot; he shouldn’t expect federal law enforcement officials to function as instruments of his convenience and will; he shouldn’t fire the head of the FBI because the FBI director wouldn’t do what he was told; and he probably shouldn’t spread malicious lies about his predecessor to divert public attention from repeated occurrences of evasion and deceit within his own administration. But, hey, that doesn’t amount to obstruction of justice. Because if it did, we’d have to impeach him. Since we aren’t going to impeach him, it isn’t obstruction of justice. Case closed.
Afterwords
It is, in fact, counterproductive to start talking about impeachment, even though lots of people did start talking about it months ago. Republicans in Congress feel that “their” voters aren’t theirs any more. They belong to Trump now. And as long as they do, it’s, again, “counterproductive” for us Democrats to talk about overturning the results of the election and putting Mike Pence in the White House.
Beyond the partisan political considerations, impeachment is an extreme, and extremely dangerous, tactic. It should never be done on partisan lines, no matter what. Clinton clearly should not have been impeached. It was an act of Republican revenge on a man they could not defeat via the ballot box. Although the Constitution says the grounds for impeachment are unspecified “high crimes and misdemeanors,” what it really means is that the president has done things which have caused him to lose the confidence of the country, making it impossible for him to govern effectively. Ronald Reagan was certainly guilty of a variety of high crimes during the Iran-Contra affair, unless it is legal for the president to secretly sell American weaponry to a hostile nation and then pocket the proceeds for his own use—principally, a secret, “private” war that violated government policies laid down by Congress. But Reagan was far too popular to be impeached, even though he was the driving force behind all of the crimes committed during the course of the “affair”. None of the Republicans in Congress would have voted for impeachment, and the Democrats were smart enough to realize that fact.
Today, of course, we’re far more partisan than we were back then. But even though Trump is easily the worst president we’ve ever had, we should endure him for the time being. I think it’s quite possible that the continued investigation of the “Russian Connection” could bring Trump down—I think it’s quite possible that his past business connections with Russia are deeply incriminating. But we will have to wait for that to ripen as it will.
