Another Look at Impeachment, After the Mueller Report

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/another-look-at-impeachment-after-the-mueller-report


Daily Comment
Another Look at Impeachment, After the Mueller Report
By Adam Gopnik
April 25, 2019
The Mueller report is a powerful and positive document, because it is written testimony to the liberal faith in the power of rules and systems to bring order and justice.

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But, on the whole, and taken on its own terms, the Mueller report is a powerful and positive document, because it is written testimony to the liberal faith in the power of rules and systems to bring order and justice. Mueller and his team were trying on every page of the report and in every instance to follow the rules, even if the rules they were following forced them into contorted prose and easily misrepresented positions. The rules are worth following, the underlying premise of the report insists, because only in accepting the rules can we insure justice. This is why the language of “norms” and their violation is misapplied to Trump and his conduct. What is at stake here are not “norms,” in the sense of ornamental ritual regularities in the conduct of office. What is at stake are rules—rules meant to insure objective judgment and fair dealing no matter who the subject may be or how you may feel about his or her conduct. These are fair-minded rules put in place by the painfully slow accession of power to procedure, equitable rules put in place over time and that, historically, remain vanishingly rare. As “Game of Thrones” reminds us—it may be the chief reason for the show’s current appeal—the rule of pure power asserting itself exactly as it likes whenever it likes is what most often happens among human beings.

This is why the idea that Mueller cleverly engineered his report to force Congress to act misses the point. Mueller didn’t intend it. The rules did. This is why impeachment—at least attempting to remove from power someone obviously unfit to hold it, whatever the outcome may be—has, within a week, passed from a distant speculative possibility to what seems to many like a primary moral duty. It is being miscast as a prudential act, or even as an act of overdue partisan aggression. Right now, it seems more like collective self-defense against a common danger.