Why Not Impeach?

Laurence Tribe explains the risks for Democrats— and what America should really be afraid of

- Alexandra Hutzler 

President Donald Trump’s foes have been talking about impeachment since before he became president. This year, their calls became deafening.

Billionaire Tom Steyer is spending tens of millions of dollars to promote impeachment. Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who enthusiastically told her supporters soon after being sworn in that “we’re going to impeach the mother******,” tells Newswe ek that she plans to introduce a House resolution to begin investigating “impeachable offenses.”

Tlaib said this just after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The Washington Post that impeachment was so divisive that “unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan,” Trump was “just not worth it.”

Harvard Law constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe would agree that impeachment can be a double-edged sword. “It is neither a magic wand nor a doomsday device,” Tribe writes in his book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, which hit shelves last year and got a paperback release early this month, featuring a new epilogue. “Instead, it is an imperfect and unwieldy constitutional power that exists to defend democracy from tyrannical presidents.”