,
24 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
1. The impeachment debate entered a new phase last week. A new focus appears to be on cost-benefit analysis. It goes like this: Donald Trump is so out of control and so dangerous that the country must not wait to get rid of him.
2. Elizabeth Drew wrote about this before the New Year. She wrote in the Times that the “dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties … to want to make a deal to get him out of there.”
3. Last Saturday, it was David Leonhardt’s turn. The Times columnist wrote that “waiting is too dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than the cost of allowing this president to remain.”
4. Cost-benefit analysis isn’t going to persuade the Democrats. This isn’t news. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment must be bipartisan.
5. She means impeachment isn’t worth the risk to her party if she can’t get enough Republicans on board. Impeachment (by a Democratic House) is pointless without successful prosecution (by a GOP Senate).
6. But Drew’s and Leonhardt’s analysis isn’t wrong.
It’s just premature.
It’s just premature.
7. We haven’t reached a tipping point beyond which most people believe that getting rid of this president is good sense. The question, then, is when that might be.
8. I don’t know, but the Democrats can hurry the timeline. They can magnify the dangers of Trump’s continuing to be president by continuing to say no to him.
9. It wasn’t clear (to me) until recently how important the border wall is to this president. The wall is real, and the Republican base really demands it. Trump thinks he must deliver or expect his 40 percent approval rating to crater.
10. Trump didn’t have much leverage going into negotiations over the federal government shutdown, but 20 days into it, he has less. In showing how desperate he is, the president is giving the Democrats more incentive to say no
11. — which forces him to make more dangerous threats, which in turn add to the pile of evidence justifying his removal, which in turn gives the Democrats more incentive to say no.
12. Last month, the president said he was going to close the entire border if the Democrats didn’t agree to more than $5 billion for a wall. This month, he said he’d keep the government closed for years if he didn’t get the money.
13.The president then threatened to fund the wall by executive fiat by declaring a national emergency. He said he had the “absolute right” to invoke the “military version of eminent domain.”
14. It’s not clear what “military version of eminent domain” means. A president can invoke emergency powers during a national emergency, but the 1976 statute concerns executive decisions made during times of war, not peace.
15. Moreover, he must make the case to Congress, and Congress can override him. (None of this is to mention that a 1,000-mile wall would take years to build, undermining “national emergency.”)
16. One thing is clear: a government seizing private property without cause would be a calamity for any president, more so for a Republican president, whose party claims to champion private property.
17. As usual, Trump overestimates his bargaining power and underestimates the cost of making threats that would, if he had the courage to follow through with them, almost surely pave the way to his political doom.
18. I admit I was skeptical of the border wall being important to Trump’s base. This is, after all, a Republican Party that mistakenly equates fighting with winning.
19. I have argued that if Trump can get Fox News to dupe viewers into believing the president is fighting like hell, he could escape this self-made crisis even if his administration never builds a border wall.
20. But the longer the shutdown goes on, the more it seems that the president really believes the end is nigh if he doesn’t bring the Democrats to heel. (He’s traveling to the border today.
21. By Saturday, the shutdown will be the longest in U.S. history.) But the more he threatens the Democrats, the more incentive they have to say nope, nada.
22. And the more these conditions are in play, the more likely it is, it seems, we will arrive at a tipping point when most people will finally see “the costs and the risks of a continued Trump presidency are worse” than getting rid of him.
23. Thanks for reading this read. It comes from @nhregister, which reprinted an earlier version published by the Editorial Board. nhregister.com/opinion/articl…
