For those of us old enough to remember the Watergate impeachment hearings, current events have a familiar ring. In particular, the nothing-to-see-here reaction of the Republican establishment, including those in the media and Congress, is all too familiar.
Their arguments then that Watergate was nothing but a third-rate burglary, that John Dean was a fabulist, that there was no proof Nixon himself did anything wrong, and that the country was against impeachment are echoed in today’s GOP party line that shaking down the Ukrainian president was a big “nothingburger,” that the whistle blower is a partisan liar, and that the Dems are trying to overturn the last election by staging a coup.
In the end, of course, Nixon resigned when the “smoking gun” finally emerged and the GOP establishment, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater, went to him and told him his support in the Senate had crumbled.
So, there is precedent for a GOP Senate finally, belatedly, begrudgingly taking on the president of their own party. But in that same precedent was the phenomenon that preceded it: most GOP senators stuck with Nixon until the very end, through thick and thin, until it was no longer viable for them to pretend that the corpse of the murder victim was not lying right in front of them.
The Nixon presidency resisted its demise even as, bit by bit, drip by drip, more damning information about Watergate and related crimes came forward — just as the Berlin Wall stood even as East Germany suffered a series of reverses in 1989, including the wholesale emigration of many of its citizens through Hungary that summer. On the surface, the power of the DDR government still seemed unassailable. When the collapse came, it did so unexpectedly one night: the border opened up, people started knocking the wall down, and in a matter of days the jig was up for the East German state (though it held on gamely for a few more months).
So perhaps there is a chance in hell, though not a big one, that Republicans in the Senate might find their moral center and give Trump the boot. If it happens, it is likely to come suddenly, in one big collapse.
But there is one crucial distinction between 1974 and now. The GOP was in the minority in both the House and Senate in those days. It would have taken only 11 GOP senators to convict in the Senate, assuming all the Democrats had voted to convict. Now, it would take 20 GOP senators to reach the 2/3 majority needed — an unlikely prospect.
More important, though, at least a few in the GOP in 1974 had showed an open mind towards impeachment; Howard Baker of Tennessee is perhaps most remembered for this, as he repeatedly asked during the hearings, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
There seems little inclination among GOP elected officials today to emulate Baker. They are scared to death of having Trump blast them in a tweet — as he did to Mitt Romney after he commented that Trump shouldn’t be asking China to investigate Joe Biden. They are scared of getting Trump’s rabid base mad at them and facing a primary. They clearly are more interested in keeping their jobs than in putting their country first.
What is the thing that is most likely to tip them into supporting impeachment? It’s unlikely to be a “smoking gun,” since there’s no guarantee there’s one out there worse than the “smoking gun” we’ve already seen in the summary of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. I don’t think we can count on GOP senators to make their decision on Trump’s misdeeds alone, however awful.
What’s most likely to provoke that one-chance-in-hell switch on impeachment is a continual slide in Trump’s popularity to levels that spell disaster for GOP pols in 2020. (It’s instructive to note that Nixon still had a 25 percent approval rate at the time he resigned — higher among Republicans.) If it looks like the Trump Titanic is threatening to drag them all down with him in an anti-GOP electoral flood, GOP officials might decide that ridding themselves of a deranged president and substituting Mike Pence is the better play for them.
If the Senate ever does convict, self-preservation, not love of country, will be reason.