As Autumn Approaches, So Does the Threat of Impeachment

The sun sets into strips of orange and blue over the hills of Los Angeles as I hide from the District of Columbia during the congressional recess. There is almost always a demand that the members of Congress remain in Washington but lawmakers haven’t stayed in the city through August since 1994—the summer that they passed the massive crime bill under President Clinton.

Soon after the nation’s elected officials retreated to their districts, there were a pair of shootings in El Paso and Dayton that renewed demands for gun control. But those demands echoed lonely through an empty Washington, and Mitch McConnell issued a watery statement making it clear that he would not be calling Congress back from recess. That move spared his troops from being forced to frown into the cameras of the reporters who ask what they will do about gun violence.

Then, in mid-August, Republican Congressman Steve King questioned whether there would be any population in the world if not for cases of rape and incest, saying at an event in Iowa, “what if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” King is the ugly edge of the Republican party, but his remark set off a news cycle that died quickly only because lawmakers were away from reporters.

Trump growled his way through the month—accusing Jewish Americans who vote for a Democrat of harboring a “great disloyalty.” A few days later, he escalated his trade war with China and gazed into the sky to call himself “the chosen one.” August was a stretch of days so absurd that reports that Trump tried to buy Greenland and nuke hurricanes felt routine.

There is no way to positively summarize the GOP’s most recent recess. Two Republicans, Reps. Will Hurd and Kenny Marchant announced in early August that they will step down. Both seats will be tight races. Republican Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia announced that he will resign at the end of the year, and the state has been trending blue since Stacey Abrams was cheated out of a governorship in 2018.

Meanwhile, Democrats slowly amassed their pawns along the edge of impeachment, setting up a darkening autumn. The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former top White House aide Rob Porter. They pushed for the courts to expedite a ruling that might force former White House aide Don McGahn to testify. They announced that will investigate Trump’s proposal to hold the next G-7 summit at his Doral resort in Miami—in that announcement they wrote “the House Judiciary Committee is examining allegations of obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by the president as part of its impeachment investigation.”

Among those Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee is Congressman David Cicilline, who was politicking in Rhode Island when I called him from a beach in Los Angeles. The lawmaker told Playboy, “I think you’ll see the Judiciary Committee continue in a very aggressive way to conduct those hearings and those proceedings so that we can gather all the evidence we need to make an informed judgement [on impeachment].”

In the last month, House Democrats reached a breaking point—more than half of them now support an impeachment inquiry but Nancy Pelosi has tried to hold her troops together as court cases aimed at the president snake their way through the legal system. Asked if it feels that the cries for impeachment are suddenly intensifying, Cicilline said “the members of the Judiciary Committee that are closest to this, that have studied the contents of the Mueller report, that have had the opportunity to hear directly from witnesses either at hearings or at depositions and to review documents; I think we came to the conclusion earlier than much of our caucus … I think there’s a growing recognition of the danger of allowing a president to engage in this lawless behavior and this pervasive criminality.”

There will eventually be a vote on impeachment, one supported by the party that will pass the House, but it will be different than the Twitter rants of outraged Democrats. It will be a strange moment, and many of us won’t know what to feel as we watch it because we have never seen a president impeached before. Cicilline told me that he believes the moment of impeachment is “akin to a war vote.”

We have no roadmap on the timing of impeachment, but, for months, there has been the thickening promise of some ugly and uncharted water in the fall. Bill Clinton was impeached in early October, if that is any point of reference. He was impeached in the second term of his presidency and soon after his impeachment, Gallup polled his approval at 73 percent. Gallup last polled Donald Trump’s approval at 41 percent.

The political wizards are expected to explain how impeachment will affect the president; how it will affect the country. They will speculate on the ramifications for approval ratings, for the Senate, for the presidential race, for swing congressional districts, and of course for Trump’s re-election. But there is no equation to predict the consequences of impeachment. No matter what they say, the pundits are wandering in the darkness and any historical comparison shudders under a microscope. All they really know—all we know at all—is that it is nearing.