The president of the United States is engaged in open and shameless corruption, defying the plain language of the Constitution and glibly defying the Supreme Court. He has ordered hundreds of people to be deprived of liberty in a foreign gulag, without charge or trial, and his administration is illegally impounding funds authorized by Congress. By year’s end, hundreds of thousands of people are projected to die because of his unilateral cuts to foreign aid, women and children wasting away from a lack of food or treatment for their HIV.
Few Democrats would disagree with that stark assessment of President Donald Trump and his first 100 days in office. Fewer still are willing to act on it.
Impeaching and removing a president from office is the constitutional remedy for a lawless executive. It’s also an inconvenience: Democrats, presented with an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to a man they have labeled a singular threat to American democracy, elected instead to go nuclear on one of their own.
“Idiotic.” “Unserious.” “Wasting our time.” “The dumbest f***ing thing.”
That’s how leading congressional Democrats described an effort by Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., to force an impeachment vote on the House floor last week.
“I have zero patience for distractions,” Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., head of the centrist New Democrat coalition, told CNN. “Any Democrat not focused on getting us to 218 is either wasting our time or helping Republicans — and either way, it’s hurting the mission.”
The mission is getting Democrats back in the House majority come 2027. In a two-party system, where the only way to punish the bums in power is to vote for the bums you previously threw out, caution can make some sense as a political strategy. Issuing press releases about your opponent’s mistakes, while avoiding any stunts that could make the conversation about you and your coalition’s failings instead, might well be enough to eke out a win 18 months from now.
That was the thinking that led Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to sign off on giving Trump a fresh pot of taxpayer money despite his refusing to spend existing appropriations for the purposes for which they were appropriated.
“Our goal, our plan, which we’re united on, is to make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in modern history by showing how bad his policies are,” Schumer explained. But the Democratic leader also hinted at future “extraordinary action” should the lawlessness of the administration become too great to ignore.
“If he defies the Supreme Court, then we are in uncharted territory that we haven’t been in for a very long time, and our entire democracy, this whole beautiful enterprise of democracy that we’ve had for over 240 years, is at risk,” Schumer said.
That is the moment we are in. Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in an El Salvador prison despite having never been convicted of or even charged with a crime — there are hundreds of others similarly being detained by an allied dictator — and the administration has been adamant about the fact that it has no intention of facilitating his return to the United States, despite the nation’s highest court ordering it do so. Some Democrats traveled to El Salvador to demand proof of life and Abrego Garcia’s release, forcing the White House to defend both its lawlessness and incompetence, but in late April, Democratic leaders reportedly decided they’d seen enough.
“They want to let the El Salvador stuff slow down,” one senior House staffer told The Bulwark, spooked by Trump’s historic domination on the question of whether foreigners deserve rights. There have been no trips since.
Bribery, from the perspective of someone with little faith in the morality of the American voter, is the cleaner hit. The president of the United States having his own cryptocurrency is an obvious and indeed acknowledged vehicle for buying his time, but it’s the $400 million gift from Qatar, in the form of a giant luxury jet, that is the clear political winner. The Constitution could not be more direct: The president cannot, without the consent of Congress, “accept any present … of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Here, too, though, there is a problem: What are you going to do about it? The remedy for a president openly contravening the country’s founding document is impeachment and removal from office. But the remedy put forward by Democrats is a non-binding resolution expressing the sense of Congress that it would really be great if Mr. Trump asked them for permission before accepting any bribe from a Gulf state.
“It is what the Constitution requires and what previous presidents have always done,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “The Constitution charges Congress with ensuring the president does not use the highest office in the land as a get-rich-quick scheme to pocket lavish gifts from foreign presidents, dictators, and emirs. It is high time that Congress do its job.”
Congress won’t, though. That’s largely because Republicans will, of course, never decide that the head of their party has gone too far this time. But if Trump defies the law of the land so he can jet around the globe in a luxury counter-intelligence nightmare, Democrats will have to explain to their own voters why they didn’t even ask their GOP colleagues to do their job.
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And that’s where the prevailing wisdom stops making much sense. The 2024 election was lost in part because too many Democratic voters stayed home, their party’s nominee playing it “safe” on issues like Gaza at the likely expense of turnout. Some critics of Thanedar’s unilateral push for impeachment accused him of just trying to win an election, noting that the 70-year-old faces a primary challenge, but Democrats would do well to try the same: Attempting things their voters would like them to do so that those voters continue to reward them with votes.
“I drafted these articles of impeachment because it’s clear that President Trump has committed impeachable crimes,” Thanedar told Salon. Among the offenses he cited are Trump’s denial of due process to expelled immigrants, impoundment of congressionally authorized spending and open solicitation of foreign emoluments.
“I haven’t heard anyone disagree with the substance of the articles,” Thanedar said, describing the effort as both the right thing to do and “what constituents overwhelmingly want.”
“It’s a matter of when the president will be impeached,” he added, “not if.”
That argument has isolated Thanedar within the Democratic caucus, prompting him to drop his push for an immediate vote on the matter. But he’s not entirely alone.
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, has announced that he, too, plans to force a vote on impeachment “at a time to be determined.” He also reminded his colleagues: It’s important to show the public that, when describing Trump as a danger to the very foundations of the country, you mean what you say.
“I opposed authoritarian President Donald John Trump’s behavior that made him a threat to our democracy prior to his election, and have witnessed that threat become a reality,” Green said in a May 15 letter to his fellow Democrats. “Therefore, I cannot, in good conscience, fail to take the action the Constitution provides to protect the American people.”
Democrats alone cannot remove Trump from office, but they can at least raise the issue of whether he should be, and in the process — attention: consultants or others just sick of hearing about, say, Joe Biden — shift the conversation away from less desirable topics. Dismissing impeachment as a stunt ignores the fact that stunts can be an effective means of doing politics, particularly at a time when the opposition has no legislative power, in this case reminding the base that it’s not taken for granted and reminding others that the rhetoric about a constitutional crisis is not how it seems to be: empty words from cynics who lack the conviction to follow through.
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