For the Record: The Impeachment Agnostic

Update below:

Image by Simone Noronha/New York Times.

With respect: she doesn't think she's "refusing to hold him accountable". She thinks she's hesitating to use a method of doing it that she regards as likely to fail. She could be wrong, but let's be careful about describing it. https://t.co/Nu7QGd3qfO

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

"Hold someone accountable" sounds like making an assertion that they COULD be held to account. "Hi Donald I know what you did and you deserve to be thrown out of office." I hold Trump accountable every day but I can't say it gets me anywhere. Pelosi does it too fairly often.

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

What's the value of impeachment-without-conviction, the process applied to Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton? Some of us have hoped the exposure of Trump's crimes in those House proceedings would demonstrate to the public that he's a criminal and unfit for office.

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

Which still doesn't mean Trump shouldn't be impeached! But let's try to be clear-eyed about what it's worth. It will make us feel like we've stood up and been counted; it will "hold Trump accountable". Maybe it will affect the public in a way previous discussion hasn't.

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

It won't save food stamps for 77,000 people in Illinois https://t.co/zr8GEWq8wV It won't stop Trump from taking bribes from his hotel guests.

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

The only thing I can think of is what they call a forlorn hope operation: a *serious* impeachment, that doesn't aim at "holding Trump accountable" and making ourselves feel righteous but at really *removing him from office*—in the full knowledge it's unlikely to succeed.

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

Kruse saying it's "purely political" as if George Washington was right and you could ever get anything done without politics. He'd know how silly it was if he'd listen to himself. #RectificationOfNames

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

Update (via NBC): On the other hand, we may well have reached the point where we can stop agonizing. Pelosi said this morning that the process of deciding on impeachment has an end

“No, I’m not trying to run out the clock,” Pelosi said at her final weekly press conference before she departs Washington for the House’s six-week summer recess. Asked how long the Democrats’ court fight might take, Pelosi would not lay out a timeline. “We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed — not one day sooner,” she said....

“A decision will be made in a timely fashion,” she said, appearing to refer to the impeachment process. “This isn’t endless, and when we have the best, strongest possible case and that’s not endless either.”

And that it's connected to the House effort to learn more about Trump's finances, which the Mueller investigation left more or less uninvestigated. And she had some very apt praise for the eager beavers who have been complaining about her:

“Everybody has the liberty and the luxury to espouse their own position and to criticize me for trying to go down the path in the most determined, positive way,” she said. “Again, their advocacy for impeachment only gives me leverage.”

Minutes later, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler explained (what I've been saying all along) that the impeachment hearings have already started:

“Whether you call that an inquiry, or whatever you want to call that, that’s what we’ve been doing,” Nadler said, later adding that they have already been conducting one “in effect.” .... “I think too much has been made of the phrase 'impeachment inquiry,'” he said.

The Nadler committee has just filed suit to get the redacted grand jury material from the Mueller report, and strongly increased pressure on former White House counsel Don McGahn, probably the most effective witness to Trump's obstruction of justice, to testify in person and to provide documents.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.