There are three positions available on the issue of impeachment.
The first position is that Donald Trump must be impeached, removed from office, and never allowed to hold public office ever again. That is the position of every Democrat and a not-insignificant number of Republicans, both in Congress and throughout the country. There is a very good Twitter thread by Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler laying out why Trump should be impeached.
The second position is that Trump didn’t do anything wrong and has done nothing to be impeached for. That position is held by most of Trump’s allies and base, and there is great defiance to the idea that the Capitol protest was either too violent/over the line or that Trump really had a hand in fomenting the rage that went into it.
The third position, however, is an intellectually dishonest position that needs to be addressed. I had addressed it in part earlier this week, but I have to expand on it a little bit more.
The idea here is that by going with impeachment, you are allowing the Democratic Party to set the standards of behavior but only as they apply to Republicans as they will never apply those same standards to themselves. And to be fair, Democrats do not hold themselves to those same standards, as evident in the various calls over the summer to support not only those who were protesting for Black Lives Matter but actually endorsed the Antifa-caused chaos that came during those destructive nights.
And it isn’t recent. Democrats for a while now have been encouraging supporters to target and harass Republicans across the country. The Democrats, supported in large part by mainstream media outlets who also endorsed said behavior, will never reflect on how destructive those endorsements were. The chaos and destruction killed businesses and left people out of work.
However, this is not about BLM/Antifa, nor is this something we should be holding off on simply because it isn’t fair that we hold them to the standards we hold ourselves to. This isn’t some fight over the rules and decorum of politics.
Dan McLaughlin at National Review is in the convict and ban from office camp, and his piece this morning explains better than I can why this is more than just a matter of partisan politics.
It is the proud boast of the United States of America that we have the oldest continuous constitutional government in the world, in which nothing — not terrorists attacks, not depressions, not pandemics, not hurricanes, not foreign wars, not the burning of our capital by invaders, not even civil war — has stopped our government of laws or impeded the timely, peaceful transfer of power between opposing political parties and candidates. The Capitol riot on January 6, given its timing around the pivotal constitutional process of counting electoral votes to effectuate such a transition, took direct aim at that central pillar of our American system. It emboldened the foes of democracy, republicanism, and constitutionalism around the globe who have long been shamed by our example.
There must be grave consequences for that. And as is true whenever society as a whole is threatened by such an outrage, those consequences must be sufficiently spectacular to deter any repetition so long as our national memory endures. Those who participated directly must be punished relentlessly to the maximum extent of federal law, without cease or mercy. And they should be confronted with vivid evidence that their cause failed utterly and permanently. The riot was inspired by Trump, and carried out by a faction of his supporters. Imposing consequences on Trump himself, and barring him from ever again holding federal office, will accomplish that end. In a less squeamish time, both Trump and the rioters would justly have had their heads mounted on pikes outside the Capitol as a warning to all.
This extends far beyond the realm of “Would the Democrats hold themselves this accountable? None of them have inspired a violent protest within the Capitol building featuring enraged supporters who wanted to physically hurt members of Congress and the Vice President. There is nothing that they have done equal to what happened last week, and it’s a false equivalency to say that they are in any way equal.
The Democrats laid the foundation, sure. That is very difficult to argue against. They spent four years casting doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s election, spurred on activists harassing Democrats and destroying private property, and generally allowed themselves to escalate political tensions to the point where what happened at the Capitol was an entirely foreseeable result.
But that foreseeable result could have been prevented or at least mitigated in part by a more responsible person who wasn’t busy stirring the pot and encourage his own side to “fight back.” What happened in D.C. could have been prevented at least in part, but it wasn’t.
It is dishonest to say that this is a battle of political standards or rules of engagement. This is about clear right and wrong. We should not be playing rhetorical games. We should be holding ourselves to the highest standards regardless of what the Democrats do.