IMPEACHMENT IS BOTH THE CAUSE AND THE EFFECT OF A TOO-POWERFUL PRESIDENCY

BY FOCUSING ALL of its efforts on impeachment during a presidential campaign, Congress has given away the game: Its members are little more than pawns in a winner-take-all battle for the presidency and its vast and ever-growing powers. Worse, they seem to prefer it that way.

Impeachment is messy, like digging out the pit from an overripe peach. The formal process is difficult for Americans to comprehend. The criteria are blurry and debatable. It requires nearly everyone involved to perform some amount of hypocritical partisan contortionism. It’s the bluntest of instruments in politics, and that’s really saying something.

Because of this confusingly contingent nature of impeachment, many in Congress are currently extremely busy practicing “strategic silence.”/Schar pollsters in early October that they support the impeachment inquiry will stick to their guns (and whether the number of likely Republican voters in their midst will grow larger).