History could forgive Trump’s defenders. But we know it will reward his deserters.
“History will judge us,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently said on the Senate floor, arguing for impeaching President Trump. It’s a line we hear a lot, pregnant with ominous implications. This is no time for the usual partisan antics, the warning intimates. We must rise to the Call of History. But how can we know what history will say about Trump’s prosecutors and defenders before we get there?
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But the Watergate saga does tell us this much: Those loyalists who abandoned Nixon early, when it mattered — who stood up for principle over party, for integrity over professional advancement, before Nixon was politically doomed — are remembered and praised for their courage. Men such as Sen. Lowell P. Weicker (Conn.) and Rep. William Cohen (Maine) cemented their legacies as honorable public servants and were lionized for the rest of their lives. Those who waited to see the writing on the wall (other Republicans in Congress, administration officials who wanted to serve the national interest but lacked the courage to break with their boss) left their fates to chance. Many of them are now remembered solely for sticking by a man who abused the power of his office — if, that is, they are remembered at all.
(BTW please show me a Lowell Weicker or a William Cohen in the GOP senate today)
The parallels between 1974 and 2019 are inexact. Republicans back then were much more independent-minded; many broke with their president not just during the impeachment process but well before that, on ordinary legislative matters. According to Congressional Quarterly’s statistics, in the early 1970s the parties stuck together on key votes between 60 and 65 percent of the time; these days, it is upward of 90 percent of the time. Back then, the GOP included liberals and moderates who had no ideological affinity for the president and openly voiced doubts about Nixon’s honesty. When Nixon left office, most of his party-mates tried to get on the “right side of history” by publicly disavowing him. Today, with a right-wing mediasphere where the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News constantly reinforce White House talking points, it’s almost impossible to imagine that happening.
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Few Republicans right now are showing the independence that Republicans like Cohen, Goldwater and Weicker displayed in 1973 and 1974. Although several prominent Never Trumpers — mostly neoconservative journalists — have vocally opposed him since before the election, and a few defenestrated administration officials such as Jim Mattis have let their contempt for the president be known, no Republicans as yet have come down in favor of impeachment. Most likely, they never will: Chances are, after all, that Trump will be acquitted in the Senate. But if they believe in their hearts that the president has traduced the Constitution and feel in their guts that something should be done, history suggests that the time to come forward is now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/31/when-should-republicans-jump-ship/?arc404=true
