Congress could censure Trump
Many Democrats are torn over impeaching Trump. They think he deserves it, but fear it may reelect him and decimate them in 2020. Here’s an alternative from an unlikely source, Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: Congress should censure Trump. She wrote:
“The harrowing part of the Mueller report is part 2, on obstruction of justice. Reading it, you feel sure the president would have loved to subvert the investigation but wasn’t good at it and was thwarted by his staff. There are seemingly dangled pardons and threatened firings. There’s a hapless small-timeness to it, a kind of brute dumbness, and towering over it all is a grubby business deal in Moscow.
“It’s unseemly.
“Congressional censure would be a formal registering not of Congress’s political disapproval but its moral disapproval. It is a rarely used form of shaming. Congress has censured its own members over the years, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954—but no president since Andrew Jackson in 1834.
“Republicans, who control the Senate, wouldn’t vote to remove the president, but to morally disapprove of him? They would. There’s plenty of suppressed resentment there at how he’s mortified them and lowered things.
“That is the less invasive path, the less damaging to the country, the less pointlessly polarizing.”
There’s a recent censure precedent for a President, Bill Clinton. When Republicans were hot to impeach him in 1998, the group MoveOn.org was formed. Its message was “Censure and Move On.” An online petition said, “Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.” Democrats who wouldn’t impeach Clinton might have voted for censure.
Noonan thinks Republican Senators would vote to “shame” Trump. I’m not so sure. They live in fear of Trump’s base. (Thom Tillis might vote twice, “aye” once and “nay” once.) But censure requires only a majority of the Senate, not two-thirds.
Censure could appeal to Democrats because it puts Republicans on the spot. Censure also provides an outlet to some Republicans, like one former statewide office-holder who considers Trump a “despicable” person, but supports his policies.
Censure gives Democrats in Congress a chance to air out – at great length and high visibility – Trump’s misdeeds AND to leave the final judgment about his removal from office to the voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and whatever other states matter in the presidential election.
Given how Nancy Pelosi has resisted impeachment, you might think she’d like censure. But she said today, “No. I think censure is just a way out. If you’re going to go, you’ve got to go. In other words, if the goods are there, you must impeach, and censure is nice, but it is not commensurate with the violations of the Constitution, should we decide that’s the way to go.”
She added a dig at Trump, saying censure would be “a day at the beach for the president, or at his golf club, or wherever he goes.”
A footnote: A new history, “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” by historian Brenda Wineapple, takes a deep dive into the impeachment of Raleigh’s native-son President. Johnson was about as dislikeable, disagreeable and disreputable a Chief Executive as you can imagine. He managed to offend about everybody in Washington. Although he had opposed secession, he wanted to welcome the secessionist leaders back into the Union. And he seemed to think that slavery restored under another name was just what the nation needed.
Johnson famously escaped conviction by the Senate and removal from office by one vote – not, as JFK famously wrote, by a Profile in Courage, but more likely by a profile in corruption: bribery.
Congress could censure Trump
Many Democrats are torn over impeaching Trump. They think he deserves it, but fear it may reelect him and decimate them in 2020. Here’s an alternative from an unlikely source, Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: Congress should censure Trump. She wrote:
“The harrowing part of the Mueller report is part 2, on obstruction of justice. Reading it, you feel sure the president would have loved to subvert the investigation but wasn’t good at it and was thwarted by his staff. There are seemingly dangled pardons and threatened firings. There’s a hapless small-timeness to it, a kind of brute dumbness, and towering over it all is a grubby business deal in Moscow.
“It’s unseemly.
“Congressional censure would be a formal registering not of Congress’s political disapproval but its moral disapproval. It is a rarely used form of shaming. Congress has censured its own members over the years, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954—but no president since Andrew Jackson in 1834.
“Republicans, who control the Senate, wouldn’t vote to remove the president, but to morally disapprove of him? They would. There’s plenty of suppressed resentment there at how he’s mortified them and lowered things.
“That is the less invasive path, the less damaging to the country, the less pointlessly polarizing.”
There’s a recent censure precedent for a President, Bill Clinton. When Republicans were hot to impeach him in 1998, the group MoveOn.org was formed. Its message was “Censure and Move On.” An online petition said, “Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.” Democrats who wouldn’t impeach Clinton might have voted for censure.
Noonan thinks Republican Senators would vote to “shame” Trump. I’m not so sure. They live in fear of Trump’s base. (Thom Tillis might vote twice, “aye” once and “nay” once.) But censure requires only a majority of the Senate, not two-thirds.
Censure could appeal to Democrats because it puts Republicans on the spot. Censure also provides an outlet to some Republicans, like one former statewide office-holder who considers Trump a “despicable” person, but supports his policies.
Censure gives Democrats in Congress a chance to air out – at great length and high visibility – Trump’s misdeeds AND to leave the final judgment about his removal from office to the voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and whatever other states matter in the presidential election.
Given how Nancy Pelosi has resisted impeachment, you might think she’d like censure. But she said today, “No. I think censure is just a way out. If you’re going to go, you’ve got to go. In other words, if the goods are there, you must impeach, and censure is nice, but it is not commensurate with the violations of the Constitution, should we decide that’s the way to go.”
She added a dig at Trump, saying censure would be “a day at the beach for the president, or at his golf club, or wherever he goes.”
A footnote: A new history, “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” by historian Brenda Wineapple, takes a deep dive into the impeachment of Raleigh’s native-son President. Johnson was about as dislikeable, disagreeable and disreputable a Chief Executive as you can imagine. He managed to offend about everybody in Washington. Although he had opposed secession, he wanted to welcome the secessionist leaders back into the Union. And he seemed to think that slavery restored under another name was just what the nation needed.
Johnson famously escaped conviction by the Senate and removal from office by one vote – not, as JFK famously wrote, by a Profile in Courage, but more likely by a profile in corruption: bribery.