A decade ago, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CNN, and MSNBC all dismissed potent appeals for Congressional action to censure George W. Bush and Dick Cheney after the former President and Vice President maneuvered the United States into an undeclared, illegal, immoral, and ultimately catastrophic war in Iraq.
For the most part, media outlets get excited about impeachment only if claims of alleged wrongdoing are salacious (as with the ridiculous attempt by Congressional Republicans to remove Bill Clinton in the late 1990s), or if there is general agreement that an executive has veered so dramatically off course that the elites themselves begin to worry about a threat to their circumstance.
There is good reason to believe that Donald Trump will ultimately inspire precisely those worries. His erratic and arbitrary approach to even the most basic of responsibilities, his disregard for facts in combination with his rank dishonesty, his penchant for surrounding himself with authoritarians, and his willingness to act on their advice have already caused very powerful people to fret that this presidency could end in tragedy--for Trump and for the country.
But, at least for now, most elites are not sufficiently concerned about Trump's misdeeds to contemplate his removal from office before the end of a term that concludes on January 20, 2021.
As such, Sherman's proposal for more immediate relief was accorded a half-column on the corner of page 11 of the national edition of The New York Times. The article featured an academic and a Republican congressman brushing off the intervention, as the paper itself chimed in to declare: "The congressman's efforts to impeach the president, just six months into his term, have virtually no chance of succeeding given the strong majority Republicans hold in the House, where impeachment proceedings must begin."
The reviews were just as bad, or worse, from other major newspapers and the broadcast networks--as well as from the cautious political websites that fantasize that they are "new media" but generally repurpose "old media" dogma with bells and whistles.
It was the journalistic equivalent of Bob Dylan singing, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere."
This is how it works in Washington, D.C.: While America is increasingly post-partisan, or more precisely anti-partisan, our media frame the national discourse in the narrowest of partisan terms. In effect, the media constrain rather than encourage debate about obvious and necessary responses to evolving crises.
Never mind that the overwhelming majority of Americans have lost confidence in a President who, it should be remembered, received only 46 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election and trailed his Democratic rival by almost three million votes.
Never mind that the nation's great Constitutional scholars say this loss of confidence is appropriate, as the President has committed acts that put him at odds with his oath of office and his duties to the republic.
Never mind that those scholars argue that Trump has committed impeachable acts. Never mind that polls show more Americans favor Trump's impeachment than oppose it. Never mind that, where citizens and their elected representatives are given an opportunity to weigh in on the matter of Trump's continued tenure, they have done so--with formal resolutions calling for Congress to impeach Trump coming from communities across the country, from a town meeting in tiny Charlotte, Vermont (population 3,754), to the city council of Los Angeles, California (population: 3,976,322).
Whenever impeachment is placed "on the table" by the American people and emboldened officials such as Sherman, it is snatched back by partisans who have no taste for a debate about this constitutional remedy.
Never mind that, through petitions and letter-writing campaigns and marches and rallies, millions of Americans are, according to attorney John Bonifaz, a key figure in the burgeoning Impeach Donald Trump Now Campaign, "rising in the defense of our Constitution and our democracy!"
Whenever impeachment is placed "on the table" by the American people and emboldened officials such as Sherman, it is snatched back by partisans who have no taste for a debate about this Constitutional remedy. This does an injustice to the nation's Constitutional history. As George Mason told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, "No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should be continued."