Impeachment and conviction will allow the GOP to wash away the stain of dishonor that Trump has stamped upon their party.
As a matter of principle, Congressional Republicans should support the impeachment and conviction of Donald Trump.
The Republican Party, after all, is the nation’s conservative party—the party of liberty, the rule of law, faithful adherence to the Constitution, and the separation of powers.
Yet, all this and more was flagrantly assaulted in the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attack on the Capitol that Trump shamelessly and unapologetically orchestrated.
Why, then, are so few Republican lawmakers in favor of impeachment? In a word: politics.
Congressional Republicans have convinced themselves that Trump commands the allegiance of too many voters in their districts and their states to risk supporting his impeachment.
Their fear: that they will face a pro-Trump challenger who will defeat them in a primary and destroy their political careers.
This fear is understandable, but shortsighted and myopic—and it risks destroying the Republican Party.
The obvious truth is that Trump is intensely loathed and despised by a clear majority of voters nationwide. And everything he has done in the past two months since losing the election to Joe Biden has made him even more reviled, and justly so.
As the New York Times’ Bret Stephens points out:
The president attacked the states, in their right to set their own election procedures. He attacked the courts, state as well as federal, in their right to settle the election challenges brought before them.
He attacked Congress, in its right to conduct orderly business free of fear. He attacked the vice president, in his obligation to fulfill his duties under the 12th Amendment.
He attacked the American people, in their right to choose the electors who choose the president.
The risk to Republicans is that by trying to appease Trump’s base, they risk losing the country, as they did in the election, and it wasn’t even close. Trump lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes, and he lost the electoral college 306-232.
Trump Voters. Republicans obsess over Trump voters; but the truth is that Trump voters, all 74 million of them, are hardly a monolith.
Sure, many of them may be diehard Trump fans, but many (yours truly, for instance) are not. Many can be constructively engaged and persuaded through good-faith efforts to tell them the truth.
Unfortunately, too few Republican officeholders are willing to tell their voters the truth—the truth about the 2020 election and the truth about Donald Trump; and, until they do, the future of the Republican Party is in grave danger.
Indeed, if Republicans think the loss of two winnable Senate seats in Georgia was bad, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Worse and even more catastrophic political losses may be yet to come, and precisely because of their uncritical embrace of Trump.
Watershed Moment. The Jan. 6, 2021, Trump-engineered assault on the Capitol was a watershed event that will live in infamy. Elected Republicans need to recognize this and respond with the seriousness of purpose that the times and the moment demand.
Impeaching and convicting the ringleader of this attack, Donald J. Trump, is the right and necessary place to start.
Feature photo credit: Violent thugs, summoned by Trump to Washington to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, scale the walls of the United States Capitol as they begin their assault on Congress (José Luis Magaña/Associated Press, courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer.)