The Border Wall Is Trump’s High Crime - There's no better reason for Democrats to impeach him.

[Lynch a Rightist, Save America]

The Border Wall Is Trump’s High Crime
There's no better reason for Democrats to impeach him.
By OSITA NWANEVU
August 29, 2019Add to Pocket


There are, by the latest count, at least 130 House Democrats who support
impeaching President Donald Trump, a number that has risen quietly but
steadily in the wake of Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary
Committee last month. While that cohort counts many senior members of House
leadership among its members—including caucus Vice Chair Katherine Clark and
powerful committee heads like Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel and
Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding firm in
her opposition to moving forward with an inquiry.

In a conference call Friday, Pelosi reportedly told her caucus that although
she “grinds her teeth” nightly “about what’s going on in the White House,”
Democrats should be “unifying and not dividing,” and that—House Judiciary
Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler’s suggestions that impeachment is already
underway evidently notwithstanding—the party should wait for a stronger case
for impeachment to emerge given that “the public isn’t there” on beginning
proceedings.

Late Tuesday, The Washington Post handed Pelosi that stronger case. According
to multiple officials reached by the Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey,
Trump, in his eagerness to finish a substantial portion of the border wall by
next year’s Election Day, has not only urged the wanton seizure of private
land and violation of environmental regulations, he has also assured his
subordinates “that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should
they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly.”

“When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable Trump
has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead,”
they wrote. “He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the
use of eminent domain, saying ‘take the land,’ according to officials who
attended the meetings.” Asked by the Post for comment, the White House
claimed that Trump had been joking. True to form, Trump himself called the
report “fake news” in a Wednesday tweet.


But the Post thoroughly documented a series of the White House’s eyebrow-
raising demands and arrangements. Trump, for instance, has insisted that one
of the contracts for the wall’s construction go to North Dakota firm Fisher
Industries, evidently at the recommendation of North Dakota Senator Kevin
Cramer, a major recipient of contributions from Fisher’s CEO. Earlier this
month, the Post reported that Cramer temporarily stalled the confirmation of
a White House budget official to obtain sensitive information from the Army
Corps of Engineers about Fisher’s competitors for the bid. After relenting,
Cramer issued a statement claiming, remarkably, that Trump had “deputized”
him to help manage the bidding process.

The Post has given us not a story about this administration, but the story
about this administration—the part that contains the whole, the line running
under all that troubles us about this era, rendered in bold: the president’s
fomenting of racial and cultural hysteria and blows to the rule of law are
aimed at enriching the already wealthy in ways already too familiar to us.
The politicians of the Republican Party are not just complicit in this
arrangement, they are its primary guarantors. The allegations make both our
national situation and the sensible course of action plain.


Must-reads.
5 days a week.
Your email
Sign Up
As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Research Director
Robert Maguire tweeted early Wednesday, the abuse of the presidential pardon
power the Post describes was explicitly discussed by the Framers of the
Constitution as the document was being ratified.

During Virginia’s ratification convention, George Mason objected to creating
the pardon power on the grounds that a president could conceivably, “pardon
crimes which were advised by himself.” To reassure him and other skeptics,
James Madison replied that there would be an obvious remedy for such a
situation. “[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with
any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him,” he said,
“the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found
guilty.” For Madison, the mere possibility that the president might pardon
someone for activity suspiciously connected to himself was sufficient grounds
for impeachment.

In any case, the technicalities of the president’s alleged promise are
secondary. The wall is both an administrative boondoggle and a moral
travesty, an idiotic project that will be effectual only as a symbol of the
racism at the heart of the administration’s immigration agenda. An
impeachment on the wall would be an opportunity to put that agenda on trial—a
chance for Democrats to invite testimony against this president, before a
raptly attentive national audience which would include some of the Americans
and aspiring Americans the administration has hurt most directly.


Far from trivializing the Mueller report, this shift in focus would
underscore the significance of its most troubling revelations. Those who
asked after the report’s release what the offenses described could possibly
have to do with the material problems facing this country should see now that
the erosion of the rule of law can shape policy outcomes. In this case, the
president’s lawlessness is facilitating a plan that would cleave apart and
impose financial and environmental costs on Americans living in border
communities, and legitimize anxieties that threaten immigrants across the
country.

It is true that the Senate will never convict Trump. It also remains true
that impeachment, beyond being a constitutional responsibility and a moral
obligation, is a key political opportunity for the Democratic Party. Both the
theatricality of the proceedings and the substantive information they might
reveal could burden both the president and endangered Senate Republicans
ahead of next year’s elections. At 35 percent according to the latest
Monmouth poll, support for impeaching Trump remains substantially higher than
public support for impeaching President Richard Nixon ahead of the first
Watergate hearings in 1973. That support could rise if impeachment is finally
endorsed by the upper rungs of House leadership.

Even voters wary of impeachment might be more forgiving of an inquiry focused
on wrongdoing in the construction of the border wall and across Trump’s
immigration regime than one premised on the Mueller investigation. On
Wednesday, a Quinnipiac poll showed that 59 percent of Americans disapprove
of Trump’s handling of immigration broadly speaking; in late July they found
a majority of Americans considered conditions in Trump’s detention centers
“inhumane” and “a serious problem.” On the wall specifically, Politico and
Morning Consult’s August tracking poll shows that a 54 percent majority of
Americans believe the border wall should be a low priority or not constructed
at all. The public, already primed against the president on the issue, would
need no mental timeline of meetings, memos, and recusals, or working
knowledge of the Emoluments clause to engage with the matter at hand.

Democratic activists, of course, are already ahead of the broader public. At
the San Francisco Democratic Party’s “Heart of the Resistance” dinner last
week, at which Pelosi received a Lifetime Achievement Award, protesters with
the group CREDO Action interrupted her speech to demand impeachment now—not
for the potential wrongdoing detailed in the Mueller report but the
immigration policies and rhetoric from the White House that have fueled
racist violence, including this month’s shooting in El Paso. “Speaker Pelosi,
I am undocumented,” CREDO Campaign Manager Thaís Marques yelled from atop a
table. “My community is being targeted by ICE! My people are dying! My people
are being killed by white supremacists! Impeach Trump now!”

Like the president and his Republican supporters, the gunmen responsible for
the El Paso shooting and last year’s Tree of Life shooting in
Pittsburgh—respectively the deadliest attacks against Hispanic and Jewish
Americans on record—argued that the country is being ‘invaded’ and imperiled
by dangerous immigrants, a situation that for them, as it surely will for
others, justified mass murder. In the latest case, furor over the link
between what the president says and what the most dangerous people in the
country have proven themselves willing to do lasted all of about a week; the
usual lamentations that we might, as a country, become used to these
outbreaks of mass violence and our climate of racial paranoia, faded, as
proof that we already have.

Our handiest excuse—that the ceaseless stream of bad news and bullshit to
which the Trump era has subjected us has left us helpless, confused, and
overwhelmed, that too much has gone too wrong too fast to let ourselves sit
still with any particular outrage or worry—is wearing thin. For as much as
this president may have robbed us of sleep and self-respect, he has neither
meaningfully diminished our agency nor our responsibility to, whenever we
can, pin down a particularly important pattern of facts or a particularly
significant story before it floats away into the ether and the noise.

The Post’s story is worth pinning down. These allegations are a place for us,
as a country, to fix our attention even if the news presents us with a
flashier bit of drama tomorrow—even if the president tries to buy Antarctica
next week. Impeachment would ensure that we do. Given the state of inertia
among key Democratic leaders, it might not happen for this or any other
reason. That should continue to trouble us as much as everything else
happening under this administration. An opposition party without the
fortitude and daring to do the right thing here can hardly be relied upon to
transform the American health care system, or save the planet, or accomplish
any of the major promises breezily being offered by the current crop of
Democratic presidential candidates on the stump. But the Democratic Party
will never be moved if we don’t find ourselves sufficiently moved to stand
fast and insist that this does, and must, matter.