WASHINGTON — With talk of impeachment ramping up, the White House is digging in its heels with the mantra that congressional investigations are a waste of time.
"Look, every single minute that Congress spends on that, we're not spending on infrastructure, we're not spending on lowering prescription drug prices, we're not spending on Iran, China, North Korea, new trade deals," said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in response to multiple questions Wednesday after special counsel Robert Mueller summarized his findings and announced his job was done.
"Every single thing that they're doing is taking away from things that could actually help the American people," Sanders said.
Sanders may be both wrong and right in her prediction, according to scholars on American government.
The federal government would continue to function on a basic level if an impeachment inquiry was launched. In fact, Congress and the White House got quite a lot done during previous impeachment proceedings as lawmakers investigated former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
But the fact that few people know what else was accomplished while the House moved toward impeaching Nixon in 1973-74 and Clinton in 1998 reveals a cost that could be exacted from both Congress and the White House if Democrats continue investigating allegations against President Donald Trump by the special counsel.
“Every single thing that they're doing is taking away from things that could actually help the American people.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
"Legislating and governing goes on, but if the president or congressional leaders want to push a certain agenda, sometimes the investigations can just get in their way because that's what the public, or reporters, want to hear about," said Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Government Affairs Institute.
That assumes, he added, that a divided Congress and the administration would have realistically been able to get anything done before the 2020 election besides passing spending bills and raising the debt limit. So "getting things done" may not be the true main concern of either Congress or the White House when it comes to impeachment.
"The main political calculation is what good does an impeachment inquiry do for the fuzzy goal of actually removing the president or the goal of winning the 2020 election," Glassman said.
Multi-tasking
In his 400-page report and in last week's public remarks, Mueller invited Congress to carry on the investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, saying "the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing."
That process begins with an impeachment inquiry by Congress.
Pressure is building among liberal House Democrats to declare the House Judiciary Committee's ongoing investigation an impeachment inquiry, which could give the committee more legal clout to subpoena witnesses and access to more information, which could lead to an impeachment vote in the full House.
But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has so far resisted calls among a vocal minority of her party for an impeachment inquiry. She knows the Senate would not convict the president, so she instead wants to continue to have House committees investigate without impeachment.
Matt Slocum, AP
FILE - In this May 24, 2019, file photo, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks during a panel discussion at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pa. Pelosi's impeachment balancing act is toggling between mounting pressure from Democrats who want to impeach President Donald Trump and her own political instincts for a more measured, "ironclad" investigation. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)
"You sort of move forward investigating until there's some sort of public support for (impeachment)," Glassman said. And so far, that support isn't there. A Washington Post poll in April showed majority of Americans oppose Congress launching impeachment proceedings.
Congress, with its work distributed among committees, is set up to tackle more than one issue at a time. During the Watergate hearings that forced the resignation of Nixon, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, passing the Endangered Species Act and the War Powers Resolution, among other major pieces of legislation.
And the same year the House impeached Clinton, a Republican controlled Congress passed a $200 billion transportation infrastructure bill, and the International Religious Freedom Act.
In 2019, the top five priorities Americans want the new Congress to tackle are lowering prescription drug prices, cutting the federal deficit, rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, reducing hate crimes and addressing the opioid crisis, according to a Politico poll conducted by Harvard University's School of Public Health after the November 2018 election.
A Pew Research Center survey in April listed the economy, health care costs, education, terrorism, Social Security and Medicare as the public's policy priorities for 2019.
Who's the obstructionist?
Trump stated last month that as long as Democrats continue to investigate him, he won't work with them on bipartisan initiatives, such as an infrastructure bill or a new trade deal between Mexico, Canada and the United States.
"I've said from the beginning, right from the beginning, that you probably can't go down two tracks," Trump told reporters after he abruptly ended a May 22 meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on rebuilding the nation's infrastructure. "You can go down the investigation track, or you can go down the investment track or the track of let's get things done for the American people."
Glassman said that kind of posturing gives Trump an excuse for not getting an infrastructure deal done, since the investigations aren't going away even if House Democrats don't initiate an impeachment inquiry.
“I don't think any of us can really predict the political effect of an impeachment.”
Susan Low Bloch, a Georgetown Law professor
"In some ways, it's kind of self-serving to the president if he didn't want to propose a way to pay for the infrastructure deal or if he didn't have the Republican support to cut" a deal, he said.
Pelosi told late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel last week that Trump "wants us to impeach him" because he believes the GOP-controlled Senate will exonerate him, which would work in his favor in reelection and when he is out of office. Charges based on the Mueller report could be brought against Trump when he is a private citizen.
That could be a risky strategy as media coverage of the impeachment process would reveal all the allegations in the Mueller report, which most people will never read, said Susan Low Bloch, a Georgetown Law professor.
"I don't think any of us can really predict the political effect of an impeachment," she said.
Speaking about his experience leading the charge to impeach Clinton, former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich said the strategy backfired against Republican House members in the 1998 election, while Clinton achieved one of the highest presidential approval ratings ever at 73 percent in his last two years in office.
To be sure, Clinton was privately consumed by the impeachment investigation, distracting him from other priorities, according to a New York Times analysis comparing how Trump and Clinton publicly managed investigations into allegations.
But, while Clinton tried to stay focused on his domestic and foreign policy agendas and delegate the handling of the impeachment issue to his staff, Trump can't resist responding to questions or threats of impeachment via Twitter, news conferences on other topics or in exchanges with the press, chief White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote.
"The president's style is hands-on, and I doubt he would delegate this impeachment fight to aides and lawyers," Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax and a friend of the president's, said to the Times. "This is a man who in 2016 eschewed pollsters, campaigns staffs and advisers, running the campaign basically himself. He won, so that's his playbook."
And that kind of approach can take a toll on an administration trying to accomplish other things with an election looming.
"The most valuable thing the White House has is the president's time," said Glassman, "so there is certainly an opportunity cost to these investigations or fighting these investigations (if) the president can't focus on something else."
from Deseret News http://bit.ly/2WmSLs4
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