Messy Democratic Politics is as High-Minded as it Gets

Today’s ABJ ran the commentary reprinted below in full. I agree with the central point here: we must not let our political struggles treat impeachment as an everyday strategy.

But I wonder about the section in bold, analyzing Pelosi’s strategic thinking. It suggests she was either high-minded or ‘just political.’ It is possible my response is just a quibble, but I wanted to unpack it nonetheless.

Politics is the mechanism we use to try to solve problems and choosing a democratic system is a high-minded choice. Contrasting the thoroughly expected messiness that results with principle-based decision making muddies our thinking.

This common contrast, doing the right thing or doing ‘just politics,’ is more likely meant to highlight a tension between ends and means. But as we learned from Gandhi and others we only get to choose our means and then in concert with others watch as our ends unfold, so we want our means to reflect our end, we want to be the change, to enact the end we seek. So, seeing this as an end/means tension ought to highlight the high-mindedness of the attention to 'mere means.' But an end/means frame also distracts here.

We would be better off thinking about this as a tension between politics that strengthens democracy and politics that strengthens party (or group or sect or region or demographic or class) even if it means weakening democracy.

One way to think about this is the tension between democratic politics (problem solving together) and partisanship (winning elections to win the power to identify problems and solutions).

And partisanship itself should be seen on a continuum. There is nothing low-minded about trying to win an election or confirmation or passage of legislation. If the last three years has taught us anything it is this.

So, even partisanship can be high-minded, in the same way a skilled defense attorney is necessary for the rule of law to mean anything.

But partisanship can also be low-minded, as we have seen in Mitch McConnell, putting party before community and, in particular, before respect for the rules of the game that strong democracy and resilient community life depend on. 

Does this help us understand Pelosi’s strategic choices better? 

Is a calculation to forgo a battle because one expects to lose the opposite of high-minded? If (as the commentary below warns) the decision to go forward results in amplifying divisions, civil war, and the collapse of the republic…will we look back on her hesitation as merely a pause for low-minded ‘political expediency?’

If choosing impeachment results in rioting and violence, marshal law or worse, will we look back on Pelosi’s calculations as merely wafting in ‘shifting political winds?’ Those 'political winds' are an imperfect proxy for the sentiments of voters.

The commentary below begins to recognize the error of its framing when it notes that Pelosi is wrestling with a paradox, which is often the nature of 'just politics' when the questions are particularly gnarly.

It is a paradox. We need to find a solution to this problem that will not further divide us (or might even unite most of us). But that requires the solution to be seen as high-minded, based on respect for the rules of the game, and consistent with our (a bit tattered today) shared values.

A solution that is seen as putting party before nation style partisanship will not accomplish this. Recognizing the sentiments of voters in swing districts, vote counting in your caucus, considering how the Senate might respond are all ways to weigh the degree to which any solution can be persuasively presented as an effort to solve problems together rather than merely more of the same putting party first.

This is doing politics, tacking with shifting winds, weighing the expediency and likelihood of success of various approaches, and it could also be high-minded. It is certainly not low-minded by definition.

As the quote from Hamilton makes clear below, our framers expected that ‘doing politics’ would mean contentious efforts to address tough questions together. They knew, from experience, that the tougher the questions the more ‘doing politics’ will “agitate the passions of the whole community” and divide us into camps holding competing perspectives on the tough questions at hand. 

That is not ‘just politics.’ That is democratic politics and nothing is more high-minded.

On June 25, 1973, John Dean said the words that changed everything:

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.”

Testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee, the former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon tied the administration for the first time to a cover-up and obstruction of justice. Dean’s words that day put the Nixon presidency on a path that led inexorably to his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.
Great change, as with Nixon’s downfall, is always impossible right up until the moment it becomes inevitable.

The presidency of Donald Trump intersected with its moment in history last week.

Not that Trump will resign from office or be removed; his fate is still to be determined by future events. But with the burgeoning Ukraine whistleblower scandal gaining strength and extending its tentacles across the executive branch, his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives is now certain.
It is the logical final step in dealing with any president who openly flaunts his misuse of office.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. 65 of impeachment being for “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” a standard under which Trump most certainly qualifies.

From his open defiance of the Constitution’s emoluments clause forbidding government employees from receiving gifts or profit from foreign states, to his 10 acts of obstruction of justice well documented in the Mueller Report, Trump’s unique unfitness for high office has long been apparent. We will be working to repair the incalculable and ongoing damage done by his constant attacks on the norms and conventions of our system of government far into the future.

But until details of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, referenced in a whistleblower complaint previously suppressed by the administration, began to leak, it seemed assured Trump would not face impeachment in the House before the 2020 election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been simply unwilling to take the action her constitutional office requires.

Why?

To Pelosi’s critics on the left, her outright refusal to consider Trump’s impeachment reeked of political expediency, the speaker failing to act in order to protect her centrist-district members from a difficult vote. And now, as the thinking goes, her announcement Tuesday of a formal impeachment inquiry merely signals a change to mirror the shifting political winds.

But what if her thinking has been more high-minded?
From its inception, impeachment has been something of a paradox — a political solution that in order to be considered legitimate must be seen as being above politics, based on higher principles.

“They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself,” Hamilton wrote. “The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.”

That is the greatest risk Trump’s impeachment and subsequent trial in the U.S. Senate will pose, that it will set off an escalating series of partisan battles exacerbated by our hyper-partisan society. The American experiment will not long survive if presidential impeachment becomes a frequent feature of our political landscape, especially if partisanship dictates the outcome.

Politicians of both major parties need to be mindful of that risk, and guard against it by holding all presidents to the same high standards. 

Impeachment is not precision surgery to remove a cancer from the presidency. It is chemotherapy introduced into the body politic, with all the attendant risks associated with seeking a necessary cure.

It is a weapon of last resort. It must not be a partisan cudgel.