Blog 2.1-Impeachment

1. Months after the impeachment, Clinton hadn’t just survived the impeachment process — he had managed to weather it with high approval ratings and the backing of his party.2. For one thing, the case against Clinton hinged on the findings in Starr’s report. By contrast, today’s Democrats didn’t choose to orient their inquiry around findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that examined misconduct by Trump: They are instead building a case against the president in real time, which makes it harder to predict where the public will ultimately land. Also, many Americans saw Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky as a “private matter,” but Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is much more clearly tied to his role as commander-in-chief. So it’s entirely possible that the public will be less forgiving this time.3.  By the time the House of Representatives voted to open an impeachment inquiry against Clinton in October 1998, the allegations against the president had been in the news for months. Clinton had publicly confessed to the affair in August, and in mid-September, Starr delivered his lengthy and salacious report — which included a case for impeaching Clinton — to Congress. By the time this formal announcement came, Clinton was popular and impeachment was not. 4. In mid-August 1998, an ABC News poll found that only 38 percent of Republicans thought Clinton should be impeached and removed from office. But by the time the House had voted to impeach him, about two-thirds of Republicans were on board. The GOP’s attacks, though, didn’t seem to have the effect of boosting overall support for impeachment; if anything, it just resulted in a widening partisan divide.5. It wasn’t always clear that Democrats would stand by Clinton. Some distanced themselves from the president in the lead-up to the midterm elections; others even questioned whether he should resign. The initial vote to refer Starr’s report to the House Judiciary Committee for further investigation passed by an overwhelming margin. And when the House voted a few weeks later to open a formal impeachment inquiry, 31 moderate Democrats were in support. 6. When it was the Senate’s turn to decide whether Clinton should remain in office, only Republicans crossed the aisle, with 10 GOP senators voting to acquit Clinton on at least one of the charges.7. With no committed Republican support so far, it’s very difficult to argue that there aren’t partisan elements to the investigation. And as with the Clinton impeachment, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided about the president’s conduct, which could make it difficult to build a true consensus around impeachment. 8. The Democrats’ inquiry is different, though, in that they don’t have a completed investigation like Starr’s. Democrats had an opportunity to frame an impeachment inquiry around a completed special counsel investigation after the exhaustive findings in Mueller’s report became public, but only moved forward with impeachment after the Ukraine allegations presented a new scandal and an evolving set of facts to pursue. As a result, they may be able to avoid (or at least mitigate) the perception that they were just looking for an excuse to impeach Trump, especially as new evidence continues to emerge.8.  While the allegations against Clinton were personal and moral, the conduct at issue in Trump’s case is much more closely linked to his power as president, which could mean the public will be less inclined to dismiss it as human error.