The Impeachment Needle May Soon Move

The mood has shifted against Trump, but the House has to show good faith and seriousness.

Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift.

Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and he’s a Republican. The charges will involve some level of foreign-policy malfeasance.

The ultimate outcome depends on the Senate. It takes 67 votes to convict. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them will agree to remove a president of their own party. An acquittal is likely but not fated, because we live in the age of the unexpected.

Here are three reasons to think the situation is more fluid than we realize.

First, the president, confident of acquittal, has chosen this moment to let his inner crazy flourish daily and dramatically—the fights and meltdowns, the insults, the Erdogan letter. Just when the president needs to be enacting a certain stability he enacts its opposite. It is possible he doesn’t appreciate the jeopardy he’s in with impeachment bearing down; it is possible he knows and what behavioral discipline he has is wearing down.

The second is that the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus this week to be prepared for a trial that will go six days a week and could last six to eight weeks. In September there had been talk the Senate might receive articles of impeachment and execute a quick, brief response—a short trial, or maybe a motion to dismiss. Mr. McConnell told CNBC then that the Senate would have “no choice” but to take up impeachment, but “how long you are on it is a different matter.” Now he sees the need for a major and lengthy undertaking. Part of the reason would be practical: He is blunting attack lines that the Republicans arrogantly refused to give impeachment the time it deserves. But his decision also gives room for the unexpected—big and serious charges that sweep public opinion and change senators’ votes. “There is a mood change in terms of how much they can tolerate,” said a former high Senate staffer. Senators never know day to day how bad things will get.

The third reason is the number of foreign-policy professionals who are not ducking testimony in the House but plan to testify or have already. Suppressed opposition to President Trump among foreign-service officers and others is busting out.

The president is daily eroding his position. His Syria decision was followed by wholly predictable tragedy; it may or may not have been eased by the announcement Thursday of a five-day cease-fire. Before that the House voted 354-60, including 129 Republicans, to rebuke the president. There was the crazy letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was alternately pleading (“You can make a great deal. . . . I will call you later”) and threatening (“I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will”).

There was the Cabinet Room meeting with congressional leaders, the insults hurled and the wildness of the photo that said it all—the angry president; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, standing and pointing at him; and the head of Gen. Mark Milley, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bowed in—embarrassment? Horror? His was not the only bowed head.

The president soon tweeted about a constitutional officer of the U.S. House, who is third in line for the presidency: “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her ‘upstairs’ or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”

As the Democratic leaders departed, he reportedly called out, “See you at the polls.” Mr. Trump is confident that he holds the cards here—he’s got the Senate, and the base of the party says all these issues should be worked out in the 2020 election. But he is seriously weakening his hand by how he acts.

That meeting will only fortify Mrs. Pelosi’s determination to impeach him.

The president tweeted out the picture of that meeting just as the White House made public the Erdogan letter—because they think it made the president look good. Which underscored the sense that he has no heavyweight advisers around him—the generals are gone, the competent fled, he’s careening around surrounded by second raters, opportunists, naifs and demoralized midlevel people who can’t believe what they’re seeing.

Again, everything depends on the quality and seriousness of the House hearings. Polling on impeachment has been fairly consistent, with Gallup reporting Thursday 52% supporting the president’s impeachment and removal.

Serious and dramatic hearings would move the needle on public opinion, tripping it into seriously negative territory for the president.

And if the needle moves, the Senate will move in the same direction.

But the subject matter will probably have to be bigger than the Ukraine phone call, which is not, as some have said, too complicated for the American people to understand, but easy to understand. An American ally needed money, and its new leader needed a meeting with the American president to bolster his position back home. It was made clear that the money and the meeting were contingent on the launching of a probe politically advantageous to Mr. Trump and disadvantageous to a possible 2020 rival.

Everyone gets it, most everyone believes it happened, no one approves of it—but it probably isn’t enough. People have absorbed it and know how they feel: It was Mr. Trump being gross. No news there.

Truly decisive testimony and information would have to be broader and deeper, bigger. Rudy Giuliani’s dealings with Ukraine? That seems an outgrowth of the original whistleblower charges, a screwy story with a cast of characters— Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, natives of Ukraine and Belarus, respectively, who make you think of Sen. Howard Baker’s question to the Watergate bagman Tony Ulasewicz: “Who thought you up?”

More important will be a text or subtext of serious and consistent foreign-policy malfeasance that the public comes to believe is an actual threat to national security. Something they experience as alarming.

It cannot be merely that the president holds different views and proceeds in different ways than the elites of both parties. It can’t look like “the blob” fighting back—fancy-pants establishment types, whose feathers have been ruffled by a muddy-booted Jacksonian, getting their revenge. It can’t look like the Deep State striking back at a president who threatened their corrupt ways.

It will have to be serious and sincere professionals who testify believably that the administration is corrupt and its corruption has harmed the country. The witnesses will have to seem motivated by a sense of duty to institutions and protectiveness toward their country.

And the hearings had better start to come across as an honest, good-faith effort in which Republican members of Congress are treated squarely and in line with previous protocols and traditions.

With all that the needle moves. Without it, it does not.

Everyone Knows the Truth About Politics

The Democrats are scrambling, Trump is a screwball and the sane center is getting ignored.

‘Everybody knows everything.” That mordant observation is the first of Burnham’s Laws. James Burnham was a significant mid-20th century figure, a public intellectual and political philosopher who started out on the left—as a young follower he carried on an extensive personal correspondence with Leon Trotsky —and became in time an eloquent foe of totalitarianism in whatever its manifestation. While at National Review, which he helped found, he gave his colleagues 10 maxims or laws about the realities of life. No. 5 is the wholly true, “Wherever there is prohibition there’s a bootlegger.” No. 10 has become well known: “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”

But most arresting, and richest in inference, is No. 1, which I always pare down to EVERYONE KNOWS.

The big secret is that it isn’t a secret.

In its personal application Burnham’s No. 1 Law suggests you can’t successfully or forever conceal anything bad about yourself and your nature, it will all come out and probably has. People see more than you know. Don’t focus on concealment but creation. In political terms it suggests: everyone knows your essential position and future necessities; your close-hold campaign strategies are actually obvious.

For instance:

Everyone knows Donald Trump can be taken in 2020, but everyone doubts the ability of the current Democratic field to do it. Everyone knows Elizabeth Warren has successfully created and inhabited a persona—the determined, high-energy fighter full of plans—and is killing it. She knows she has gone too far left for the general electorate and will introduce nuance and an air of greater moderation once she gets the nomination. Everyone knows this.

Everyone knows the Democratic moderates are going nowhere and cluttering up every stage, but no one minds their being there because they make the party look sane.

Joe Biden may have about 30% in the polls, but that means all the candidates to his left have about 70%. Mr. Biden’s front-runner status as a perceived moderate (changes in his stands leave him to the left of Hillary Clinton ) doesn’t demonstrate that the party’s primary-goers tilt moderate. It shows they’re mostly progressive, and the perceived moderate is getting that part of the base. The Democratic Party really HAS gone sharply left, and everyone knows.

Shall we be rude? Oh, let’s. Everyone knows Donald Trump is a mental case, including I believe Donald Trump. Why else does he keep insisting he is an “extremely stable genius”? It’s as if he knows a lot of people are certain he’s neither.

It would be nice here to say, “I don’t mean mental case. I mean his mind is a raucous TV funhouse; that he is immature, unserious, and at the mercy of poor impulse control; that he doesn’t exercise power intelligently but emotionally, and with an eye, always to personal needs.” But mental case will do.

He just fired his third national security adviser, by Twitter , under contested circumstances. They had apparently argued: the president was going to invite the Taliban, that band of gangsters, mooks and morons who housed the terrorists who killed 3,000 of us 18 years ago this week, to Camp David. Camp David! The august retreat where presidents host great nations and great allies. Where FDR met with Churchill and Reagan walked with Thatcher.

No one who knows what history IS would do this. No one who knows the American people would do it. No one who felt 9/11 in his bones would do it. But a guy going for a cheap handshake and a triumphant photo would. It’s the kind of idea a mental case might readily entertain.

By my observation something is going on with Mr. Trump’s supporters. They now concede much more about him in private than they did in the past. They use words like “unpredictable” or “emotional” or “a little chaotic.” They say, “Well, he may be crazy but maybe that’s what’s needed to keep his enemies hopping.” He may not be a good man, they concede, but the swamp has defeated good men.

What is interesting is that they no longer say what they used to—“You’ve got it wrong, he’s stable, a successful businessman, a realist.” And they no longer compare him to Reagan.

His most frequent public defenders now believe he’s a screwball, which is why they no longer devote their time to lauding him but to attacking his critics.

They’re uncomfortable. He is wearing his own people down.

To Thursday night’s debate:

The great question isn’t who got the most time or who got in a good shot, those things are rarely as important as they seem at the moment. The real question is: Did the candidates in the row of podiums show any sign that they are aware they’re going too far left? That they have come across in previous debates as extreme and outside the mainstream?

Maybe a little. There seemed to be some recalibrating. No one bravely declared they’ll outlaw all private health insurance. Ms. Warren in fact repeatedly and rather brazenly ducked the question. It must be showing up in her polls that telling more than 100 million people you’ll take away their health insurance isn’t a “popular idea.” No one called for open borders, or federal funding for abortions for transgender women. There was a lot of identity politics and autobiography.

My first impression was that so many of the contenders are such accomplished TV performers with such rounded, practiced sentences that are so dramatically delivered. It is hard to remember but JFK and Nixon were a little shy to be on TV in their 1960 debate, and a little formal. Jimmy Carter, too, 20 years later, with Reagan—they had a certain muted tone. Up until 2000 or so, national TV was a place where you would appropriately feel nervous. Now candidates are so smooth, so TV-ready. Performers in their natural habitat.

This isn’t new, of course. But each cycle it seems a little more so, and a little more unsettling.

Ms. Warren was relatively quiet, almost recessive during the first half, and emerged unscathed as Bernie Sanders and Mr. Biden went at each other. Mr. Biden was fine. As Mr. Sanders spoke and gesticulated in his wide and ranty way I remembered that sometimes the thing that works against you is also what works for you. He comes across like your angry Menshevik uncle in the attic, but like that uncle he means what he says, is sincere and convinced, and that has its own power.

***

I close with a last thing everyone knows, if they only think a minute. When we talk about politics we all obsess on alt-right and progressive left, those peas in a sick pod, and no one speaks of the center, which is vast and has something neither way-left nor way-right has, and that is a motivating love for America itself, and not for abstractions and ideologies and theories of the case. As a group they are virtually ignored, and yet they are the center of everything. They include those of the left who are no longer comfortable in a new progressive party. And rightists not comfortable with Mr. Trump, or with the decisions and approaches of the Bush era. It includes those experiencing ongoing EID—extreme ideological discomfort.

In this cycle they continue to be the great ignored. And everyone knows.

Mueller’s Exit and an Impeachment Alternative

Trying to overturn an election would be too divisive. Congress should censure Trump instead.

If Justice Department guidelines had been otherwise—if federal charges could be brought against a sitting president—would Mr. Mueller have recommended them? That’s the question. Instead we get “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Oh.

Independent counsel Ken Starr wasn’t so shy with Bill Clinton: His 1998 report outlined to Congress 11 possible grounds for impeachment.

I’m sure Mr. Mueller was trying to demonstrate probity. But it looked to me like a loss of nerve. You can have probity plus clarity, and clarity was what was needed.

The spirit of impeachment is now given a boost.

It is still a terrible idea.

It is a grave matter to overturn an election result. Why more cuttingly divide an already divided country? There is no argument that impeachment would enhance America’s position in the world, and no reason to believe it would not have some negative impact on the economy, meaning jobs. The presidential election is in 2020. What is gained from devoting the coming year to an effort that will fail in the Senate? There’s no reason to believe the public is for it. It won’t move the needle—those who like President Trump, like him; those who do not, do not; everyone already knows what they think. For Democrats it could backfire, alienating moderates and rousing those of the president’s supporters who care little for him personally but appreciate his policy achievements, such as his appointment of judges. Why rouse their wrath? If Mr. Trump is acquitted he will pose as the innocent but unstoppable victor over a witch hunt led by a liberal elite.

At this point, could Democrats even do it? Impeachment is “a heavy lift,” as Chris Matthews said on MSNBC the other day. It takes time and focus to organize it politically and legally, to get the committee chairmen on board and investigators mobilized.

Republicans Need to Save Capitalism

Democrats have gone left, so they’re not going to do it. The GOP needs a renewed seriousness.

.. Pew Research sees the party lurching to the left since 2009; Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped 23 points since 2000. But you don’t need polls. More than 70 Democrats in the House, and a dozen in the Senate, have signed on to the Green New Deal, an extreme-to-the-point-of-absurdist plan that is yet serious