Noonan suggests censure instead of impeachment; and praising Pelosi
(snip)
If Justice Department guidelines had been otherwise—if federal charges could be brought against a sitting president—would Mr. Mueller have recommended them? That’s the question. Instead we get “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Oh. Independent counsel Ken Starr wasn’t so shy with Bill Clinton: His 1998 report outlined to Congress 11 possible grounds for impeachment. I’m sure Mr. Mueller was trying to demonstrate probity. But it looked to me like a loss of nerve. You can have probity plus clarity, and clarity was what was needed. The spirit of impeachment is now given a boost.
(snip)
And Speaker Nancy Pelosi is famously not on board. She will continue to play her careful game. “Nothing is off the table,” she said a few hours after Mr. Mueller spoke Wednesday. Democrats must investigate fully so they can find the truth and make the case. She will support hearings and subpoenas, slow and deepen the process, and, I suspect, move to impeach only if he is re-elected. This is a way of playing for time. Progressive Democrats likely won’t be as hot for impeachment in the fall, when the 2020 contenders are taking full flight and party energy goes to helping them. Mrs. Pelosi is a practical woman. She is always underestimated by Republicans as the Shaky Lady. She doesn’t seem shaky to me. She is running rings around Mr. Trump and her own conference. Mr. Trump is obsessed with looking competent and in control. She actually is competent and in control. She’s held on to leadership a long time.
“She knows how to count,” they say, but it’s more than that. The young progressives in her conference who are not shy to be aggressive against others, never want to get crosswise with her. She inspires respect and fear, which is what she needs to inspire. She is said to know where everyone in her conference stands, what they need, and how to keep them or flip them. She apparently gets first-rate intel from her staff and is an epic fundraiser. She takes pleasure in the game, handles Donald Trump like a boss—she is the sole figure in Washington who seems unfazed by him—and does all this as a woman in her 70s with a public presentation that is not compelling. If she’d been born British and was a Conservative, they’d probably have Brexit by now. History should pay more serious attention to this unique figure.
(snip)
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.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/muellers-exit-and-an-impeachment-alternative-11559256752 (paid subscription)
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