By Hank Beckman -
With an impeachment vote near in the U.S. House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be wise to reflect on another prominent Democrat’s effort to pull off a similarly daunting task.
When Hillary Clinton was a new First Lady, her husband gave her the responsibility of reforming the nation’s health care system.
Maybe he thought it would get her out of his hair, leaving him to focus on really big issues like the economy, the Supreme Court and how fast he could spend the “peace dividend” we got from the end of the Cold War. (Or perhaps he thought keeping her busy would leave him free to concentrate on cute young interns and other extracurricular activities. Who knows?)
But as it turned out, far from being some marginal issue of concern only to mothers, medical professionals and human resource managers, the health care system is a huge part of the economy, about one-sixth of it, according to some estimates.
So she got some sound advice from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (DEM-New York) about the prospects for such a monumental piece of legislation.
“They pass 70-30,” he is reputed to have warned her about what could happen in the Senate. “Or they fail.”
Moynihan’s advice seems like a no-brainer: to approach something as huge as health care reform in a strictly partisan manner is a recipe for disaster.
But Clinton ignored Moynihan’s advice and forged ahead with her my-way-or-the-highway approach, only to find that she didn’t even have enough support to force formal votes in either house of Congress.
The HillaryCare fiasco was the main reason the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years and effectively ended Hillary’s plans of a co-presidency with her husband.
For all of his reputed brilliance, the lesson of HillaryCare was lost on Barack Obama.
He was determined to reform the health care system, but he lacked the legislative skill required to put together bipartisan support; or the ability to convince the American people. Despite his reputation for eloquence, the more he tried to sell the Affordable Care Act, the worse the poll numbers got.
ObamaCare was finally passed into law, but with not one Republican vote, and only after Harry Reid employed the unusual tactic of budget reconciliation to avoid a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
The immediate result was that the Democrats lost control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections in what even Obama described as a “shellacking.”
Were anyone to look, modern examples of the wisdom of cobbling together bipartisan support for major initiatives are not hard to find.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 drew significant support from both parties. What Lyndon Johnson lost in support from Southern Democrats, he made up for by bringing Republicans on board, who actually supported the historic bill in greater percentages than Democrats. He also got a near-unanimous Congressional stamp of approval for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which set the stage for escalating the war in Vietnam. More recently, George W. Bush received significant Democrat support in Congress for his authorization to use military force against Saddam Hussein.
While LBJ’s party did suffer losses in the 1966 midterm elections, those losses really weren’t that unusual, considering the landslide he rode to reelection in 1964. They also weren’t big enough to cost him control of Congress. And his escalation of the war figure little in those Democrat losses; the public didn’t turn against the war until later in the decade.
George Bush, protected by the public’s realization that many Democrats—afraid to be called soft on matters of national security—had a big piece of his Iraq policy, handily defeated John Kerry and retained control of Congress in 2004. It was only after the war took a turn for the worse and events proved that Bush was tragically wrong about the wisdom of nation-building in a country rife with sectarian divisions that Republicans lost their grip on Congress.
Judging from the limited examples in the modern era, impeaching a president who has the support of roughly half the electorate also demands strong bipartisan support—if the party doing the impeaching knows what is good for it.
Democrats already had some Republican support for impeaching Richard Nixon, with 6 of 11 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee for the first article of impeachment dealing with abuse of power.
But then after tapes were released showing the president knew about the cover-up long before he previously admitted, what Republican support he had vanished and Senators like Barry Goldwater let him know in no uncertain terms that support for his removal from office was strongly bipartisan. In the face of such opposition, Nixon resigned, sparing the nation the agony of certain impeachment and a Senate trial.
Suffering no backlash at the polls, Democrats went on to retain Congress and elect Jimmy Carter in 1976.
But in 1998, when Bill Clinton actually was impeached with the slimmest of Democrat support, and acquitted in the Senate, with only slightly more Democrat support, the Republicans didn’t win in numbers typically made by the opposition party in off-year elections; Democrats actually gained 5 seats in the House.
In the middle of the impeachment process, even the credible charge that Clinton lied to a Grand Jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky wasn’t enough to convince many voters that his personal indiscretions were serious enough to remove him from office; the perception of many was that the GOP was unfairly meddling in Clinton’s personal affairs.
Speaker Pelosi is betting that a president asking a foreign government to assist in getting to the bottom of legitimate corruption concerns will offend the public as much as it does her party and the national media.
If she’s wrong, and goes ahead with impeachment without significant Republican support, come January 2021 we might be reading stories about Speaker McCarthy.
