What's next for the parties after an impeachment that everyone knows will end in acquittal?

I

vividly remember President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. I was still a kid, but everyone in my family, and everyone I knew, was glued to their screens as the drama unfolded. With hours and hours of live broadcasts, it was clear that a historic event was taking place.

That wasn’t exactly the feeling during President Trump’s impeachment last week. True, it will be remembered as only the third impeachment of a sitting American president, but the Republicans were able to paint it (rightly or wrongly) as a wholly political affair, without the slightest legal foundation.

And since everyone knows that the Senate will most likely acquit the president, the general atmosphere in Washington on that day was one of chaos and rancor but nothing more weighty.

Now, the question is: what next? How can each party benefit politically from the proceedings and what is each planning for the future? To find out, I spoke with Matt Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDAC).

“Having been through the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, I believe that this will end up backfiring on the Democrats politically,” Brooks, executive director of the RJC, said. “There is virtually no chance that the president will be removed from office by the Senate. And so, I think the American people will see this as a transparent partisan attack by the Democrats against the president and [an attempt] to overturn the outcome of the 2016 election.”

As of this writing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has surprised everyone by delaying the transfer of the articles of impeachment to the Senate. As a result, the impeachment will hang over Trump’s head like a black cloud until the Senate has the opportunity to acquit him.

Brooks called that strategy “foolish.”

“This is a loser issue for the Democrats,” he said. “You would think that Nancy Pelosi would like to get this off of her plate and dump it to the Senate as opposed to prolonging this. All the polls that have been released lately show that the American people don’t care about impeachment. They care about the record economic expansion we’re going through, the record job creation. That’s what affects people on a day to day basis. But [the Democrats] seem to have made bad political decisions throughout this whole process, so it doesn’t surprise me.”

The RJC lost no time using the impeachment to raise more money for Trump’s reelection campaign, calling on Trump’s supporters to show their support in deeds as well as words. In fact, the RJC has seen record growth and record revenue in 2019, following a record-breaking 2018.

“This president is the most pro-Israel president in history and the most passionate defender of the Jewish community against anti-Semitism ever,” he said. “People want to come to the defense of the president. We’re seeing a lot of people who want to step up and support what we’re doing.”

Outside the Jewish community, however, cracks have appeared in Trump’s base of support. Last week, in a surprise, the editor of a Christian evangelical newspaper called for the president’s impeachment. But Brooks didn’t seem alarmed by that move, saying he still expects strong support from evangelical Christians.

“The same way that there’s differences of opinion in the Jewish community, there’s difference of opinion in the evangelical community,” he said.  “I’m extremely confident that that this statement is an outlier and that the president is going to have historic support from the evangelical community.”

Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, disputed the Republican argument that Democrats sought impeachment purely for political gain.

“If that was the sole calculation, they probably would not have even gone forward with impeachment,” she said. “You saw that in Pelosi’s reluctance to take this on until the whistleblower came forward. But when it reached the point where it became clear that this president had committed such serious and grave wrongdoing, their obligation to the American people and to the Constitution [required Democrats] to go forward with impeachment regardless of the political ramifications.”

But despite that, there was another option—a vote of official censure by the House of Representatives. That was supposed to be the Democrats’ face-saver, a way of expressing displeasure with the president without the messy impeachment process that could boomerang.

But Soifer said censure would not have been a strong enough action. “It is [Congress’] obligation according to the Constitution, given the gravity of the president’s wrongdoing, to impeach the president.”

Now Washington is waiting to see when or if Speaker Pelosi will send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Here, too, Soifer says the Democrats’ calculations are anything but political.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 791)