Can Presidents Abuse Power? Senators Punt to Voters
If Trump wins re-election, it will be easy for his defenders to say impeachment contradicted the will of the American people.
Acquittal puts us in the upside-down
Photographer: Alex Edelman/Getty ImagesToday, the Senate is expected to vote against removing Donald Trump from office. But what will be the verdict of history?
In the glass half-empty scenario, Trump’s claims to have been completely exonerated will be embraced by future Americans and their presidents. High crimes and misdemeanors will be defined down to a bare minimum, and maybe out of existence altogether. The impeachment provisions of the Constitution will become more or less a dead letter — except, perhaps, in the extremely unusual circumstance where a president’s party holds less than a third of the seats in the Senate. Future presidents will embrace dirty tricks to win re-election, safe in the knowledge that the Trump precedent makes their removal vanishingly unlikely. The Democratic House’s party-line impeachment will be seen as a partisan act, not a genuine manifestation of constitutional outrage.