Why Moderates Should Embrace Impeachment

Pity the poor moderate. They have spent the last twenty years of American politics bemoaning “division” and “partisanship.” Never mind why people are divided, and never mind why people might be angry, the moderate feels personally offended by the lack of peace and quiet in the political world.

The noise just keeps getting louder, of course. The sad moderate doesn’t know what to do, other than scold people who want to take any kind of decisive action because such action might, well, be “divisive.” I do wonder about these moderates sometimes. If you dropped them into Mississippi in 1964 would they just look around and say “the real problem here isn’t racism, it’s that everyone’s just so divided!” Probably.

The moderate aversion to decisive action reared its head again this week as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries proclaimed that he would not prioritize impeachment of Donald Trump if the Democrats take the House in the upcoming midterm election. I am willing to bet that this proclamation had less to do with Jeffries’ own feelings than with Democratic leadership’s pathological fear of doing anything that might scare a moderate, even if it means alienating their entire base of voters. (Notice how the Republicans never worry about scaring moderates, pretty much proving the “both sides are equally extreme” theory to be wrong.)

Knowing that the moderate loves peace and quiet and hates confrontation, I would submit to them that they ought to embrace impeachment. We are faced with a criminal president using his office to enrich his family, taking bribes for pardons, starting an illegal disaster of a war, murdering people on boats in the oceans, sending masked agents of the state to brutalize immigrants in concentration camps and kill protestors, and abusing his power at almost every turn. The January 6th pardons on his first day in office alone are impeachable and it’s only been worse from their.

If the moderate is worried about chaos, disorder, and violence, they ought to support the removal of the biggest political chaos agent this country has ever seen from the White House. If they want things to be done as peacefully and non-radically as possible, they ought to embrace impeachment. It is the obvious legal and Constitutional remedy. All it would take is a few votes in the House and Senate to change. Hell, if all of the supposed “moderate” Republicans voted for impeachment we could get there. Once the Senate vote happens, Trump the chaos agent will be gone the next day. Wouldn’t the moderates want that?

Events this past weekend ought to wake them up. At this point I think a majority of the country considers Trump an insane criminal doing horrible damage to the country. As Trump gets wilder and more violent and less popular while the political system does nothing to check or remove him, there will be an increase in political violence. That was one of my takeaways from the incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday. The potential shooter’s manifesto did not read like unhinged rantings, as such things normally do, but as the kind of grievances that a LOT of people have, grievances based in the grim facts of the past year.

This was a wakeup call even to me. The moderates and I can agree on something, and that is the dangers of political violence. It usually creates a dialectic that encourages more and more bloodshed. Once that Pandora’s Box is opened, all bets are off. The benefits of violence are also highly overrated by its proponents, who like to call others weak and unserious as a cover for their half-baked theory of politics. Take for instance Luigi Mangione. Has his cold-blooded murder of a health care executive improved anyone’s health care, or moderated the behavior of health insurance conglomerates?

So moderates, I know you are upset that there is division, that there is partisanship, that there are people who are mad about the current situation who might say things in anger. If you want to defend “norms,” if you want to follow the Constitution, if you want peaceful change before events spiral out of control and bring about violent change, you ought to support impeachment. I can guarantee that you will not like the alternatives.

FOOTNOTE: I am sure many non-moderates will reply to me with the lazy riposte “BuT wOn’T THis JusT mAKE VanCe PreSiDeNT?” as if I am too stupid to know that. We seem to be in a situation in America today where people are incapable of being adults and realizing that a non-perfect situation can still be a substantial improvement over the status quo. Impeachment would not solve everything, but it would help solve the problem of elite impunity. Having the highest official in the land lose office then actually be prosecuted for his crimes would be an object lesson for all the other powerful criminals out there!