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POST-IMPEACHMENT THREATS BEGIN. In the last two impeachments, it was common for Democrats, activists, and cultural figures to threaten Republicans with revenge and long-lasting recriminations. Now, after the third impeachment since 1998, it’s starting again.
Take a look at the record. In the Bill Clinton impeachment, a Princeton historian, Sean Wilentz famously told GOP lawmakers that, “History will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” On the day after Clinton was acquitted on February 12, 1999, the political writer Jack Germond wrote a story headlined, “GOP faces payback for impeachment in 2000 election.” And MoveOn.org, which was founded to oppose the Clinton impeachment, afterwards launched a “We will remember” campaign, in which the organization vowed to take revenge on every Republican who had voted to impeach Clinton.
It didn’t work. Republicans went on to win control of the House in 1998. They won it again in 2000. And again in 2002. And again in 2004. They did not lose control of the House until 2006, and then for reasons entirely unrelated to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The revenge campaign never caught on.
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Fast forward to 2019. This time Democrats were the ones doing the impeaching — and again the ones threatening Republicans. After President Donald Trump was acquitted, the progressive group Democracy for America vowed, “America will not forget what Senate Republicans did today and we are more committed than ever to defeating every single coward who just voted to cover up Donald Trump’s crimes in office. Every. Single. One.”
The 2019-2020 Trump impeachment also gave birth to the Lincoln Project, the group of former Republican operatives devoted to defeating Trump and his supporters. On the day of Trump’s acquittal, two of them, John Weaver and Reed Galen, promised to “hold to account Republican officeholders who have abandoned their Article I responsibilities and oaths of office in favor of this corrupt president.” (A year later, by the time Trump was acquitted for a second time, the Lincoln Project had collapsed amid scandal and infighting.)
But the 2020 threats amounted to nothing. What was remarkable in the 2020 elections was that the first Trump impeachment, completed just months earlier, played almost no role in the election. “We acquitted Trump nine months before the last election,” noted one Republican senator recently. “How many times did it come up in the campaigns?” Answer: Not many.
Now there is the second Trump impeachment– and more threats. MoveOn.org, more than 20 years after its opening act, is back at it, promising action against what it calls the “Treason Caucus.” Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley tweeted, “This impeachment trial was a referendum on white supremacist violence. 43 Republican senators confirmed they condone it. They enable it. They must be expelled.”
Emotions are high on the left. Hollywood director Billy Ray, whose credits include Captain Phillips and Richard Jewell, pledged to devote the rest of his life to seeking the “political eradication” of Republicans who acquitted Trump. “My life now has a plan: the political eradication of the unAmerican GOP Sens who chose to acquit,” Ray tweeted on Saturday. “Time, money, energy, will — whatever it takes. They all have to be voted out of office, or hounded into retirement, or (Cruz Hawley) convicted. But the effort begins today. You in?”
So what now? Perhaps the aftermath of this impeachment will be different from the previous two. Perhaps a huge national uprising will punish Senate Republicans for acquitting the former president. But it’s more likely that tempers will cool — for most people, if not the most ardent Resistance — and the aftermath of Trump impeachment II will resemble what happened before.
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