A political generation ago, Congressman Jerry Nadler was a backbencher from the Upper West Side. A liberal Democrat with a law degree and a debater’s temperament, he was seen in New York as “a garrulously intelligent, wonkish politician whose previous claims to fame” included “fighting against Donald Trump’s projects on the West Side,” as the Times noted, in a 1999 profile. When House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, for lying about his affair with the former intern Monica Lewinsky, Nadler emerged as one of Clinton’s most ardent and public defenders, trading his obscurity for a brief moment in the national spotlight. The impeachment, he warned in the House Judiciary Committee, was a spectacular misuse of the power granted to Congress by its founding fathers, a “partisan coup d’état.”
Twenty years later, history has intervened to give Nadler another shot at Trump. And, this time, Nadler’s own party is clamoring for impeachment. Nadler’s chance came in December, in one of those little-noticed internal congressional maneuvers that can often have big political consequences months or even years later. The #MeToo movement had just claimed the eighty-eight-year-old congressman John Conyers, of Michigan, who resigned after multiple women came forward to accuse him of harassing and propositioning them. That left a prime opening to succeed Conyers as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which would oversee an impeachment of Trump if Democrats were to win control of the House in November’s midterm elections.
Nadler quickly made the case to fellow-Democrats that he was the perfect marriage of man and moment: a Trump “archenemy,” as one New York paper called him back in the nineties, familiar both with the President’s Manhattan business machinations and the nuances of constitutional law that would become relevant if the Judiciary Committee tried to impeach Trump. Nadler didn’t say so publicly, but his campaign pitch against Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat best known for her work on immigration, was all about the politically charged I-word; a leaflet he wrote and handed out to Democratic members said he was “the strongest member to lead a potential impeachment.”
In an impassioned closed-door speech to the Democratic caucus before the vote, Nadler told his colleagues that Trump had put the country “on the brink of a constitutional crisis.” The Democrats voted, 118–72, to give Nadler the job, setting him up to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if they take back the House. Impeachment, a liberal pipe dream a year ago, would almost certainly become the committee’s top priority, and the road to it would run right through Nadler, a stubborn seventy-year-old who spent the better part of two decades battling to stop Trump from rerouting the West Side Highway. History may not repeat but it does have a sense of humor.
Nadler clearly relishes the thought of taking Trump on once again, and, if and when it comes to impeachment, he will in no way be a neutral arbiter of the President’s fate but an implacable foe who has already pronounced judgment on Trump’s fitness for office. After Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey, last spring, Nadler said that there was a “very strong case” that it constituted obstruction of justice. He opened a recent town-hall meeting with constituents by saying, “This President presents the greatest threat to constitutional liberty and the functioning of our government in living memory.”
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