Bradley writes: "The Last Week Tonight host explained why Democrats are so reluctant to open an inquiry-but argued that they should do so anyway."
John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
17 June 19
The Last Week Tonight host explained why Democrats are so reluctant to open an inquiry—but argued that they should do so anyway.
t’s somewhat surprising that until now, John Oliver and Last Week Tonight have not done a deep dive on impeachment. It’s the kind of complicated bureaucratic process that Last Week Tonight has made its bread and butter—and unlike pennies or psychics, there’s already a genuine public interest in the topic. That might be why on Sunday, he told relatively few jokes—instead taking a straightforward approach as he explained how impeachment works, then made the case for impeaching Donald Trump. Oliver seemed to know that he had a captive audience for this subject with or without humor, and that in this case, the argument itself could and should be the star of the segment.
“Ever since this president got elected, people have been dying to see him impeached,” Oliver said, adding that 63 House Democrats now support an impeachment inquiry. But some Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, have been resistant. The House Speaker recently argued that impeachment does not mean what most people think it means—that it does not immediately remove a president from office. Or, in Pelosi’s words: “[a]ll you do, vote to impeach, bye bye, birdie.” Oliver conceded that Pelosi was right—but he couldn’t help but ding her for her references.
“Nancy Pelosi knows there’s simply no better way to connect with the average working joe than by referencing a Broadway musical from 1960,” Oliver quipped. “Also, if this situation were to be a musical, it wouldn’t be *Bye Bye Birdie. It would obviously be Grease, where a rapey guy with weird hair treats women like shit and yet somehow gets everything he’s ever wanted.”
The basic impeachment process begins with an inquiry in which a committee within the House investigates and holds hearings; if a majority decides they’ve found impeachable offenses, they vote to impeach. From there, the Senate holds a trial, and if a two-thirds majority votes for removal, only then will the president actually be removed from office. The basic point, as anyone who lived through the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings well knows, is that impeachment does not guarantee that a president will be booted. As Oliver points out, no president has actually been removed by the impeachment process; Clinton and Johnson were both impeached but remained in office, while Richard Nixon resigned before the House could finish impeaching him—“sort of like an Irish goodbye, if Nixon didn’t also hate the Irish.” Plus, removing Trump would require 20 Republican senators to vote for such an outcome—which seems unlikely to happen.
Right now, Oliver said, thanks to Robert Mueller’s report, the House has considerable evidence for obstruction of justice—an offense cited in both Clinton and Nixon’s impeachment cases. Unfortunately, the revelations within the report have failed to make much of an impression on the public, the majority of which remains against impeachment. But a lack of public support does not necessarily mean it’s not a good idea to hold impeachment proceedings, Oliver argued. After all, in the early days of the Nixon scandal, the public was also resistant to his removal, even dismissing the Watergate break-in. (“Although to be fair,” Oliver quipped, “in the 1970s they also thought that shag carpeting was attractive and that Liberace just hadn’t met the right girl yet.”)
Democrats, Oliver noted, worry that trying to impeach Trump could backfire for them the same way Republicans’ impeachment of Clinton did; Clinton remained in office, and Democrats actually gained seats in Congress in the following election cycle. But Oliver had two words for Democrats fretting over such backlash: “Please relax.“
“It is just one of many ways the Semocrats could lose!” Oliver pointed out. “Maybe Trump is caught on tape saying the ‘N’ word, but then two days later Elizabeth Warren accidentally calls a veteran a ‘veterinarian’ and people get twice as angry about that. There’s so many ways that this could go wrong!”
But for those who remain skeptical, Oliver also shared what finally tipped the scales for him personally: “remembering that not opening an inquiry comes with consequences, too.”
Opting not to open an inquiry, Oliver argued, “essentially sends the message that the president can act with impunity. Which is a dangerous precedent to set—not just for future presidents but for the current one.” Consider, for instance, the comments Trump made just last week about being willing to accept information about a political opponent from a foreign power—in other words, engaging in collusion. If the public is really not behind impeachment, Oliver argued, it’s Democrats’ job to try and change their minds, if they believe opening an inquiry is truly the right course of action.
“The case for inaction here is starting to get pretty weak,” Oliver said. “I know it’s easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reined Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally they don’t. . . I can’t guarantee that impeachment will work out the way that you want it to because it probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. Because if nothing else, we’d be standing by the basic fundamental principle that nobody is above the law.”
