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.”
Over the course of two recent conversations with me, Nadler was just as scathing regarding Trump. The indictment of thirteen Russians by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, on charges of manipulating the 2016 U.S. election had just been released, and Nadler said he believed that Trump’s refusal to retaliate for the Russian intervention was as serious as if an American Commander-in-Chief had failed to respond to the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. “It’s a fundamental attack on our way of life. It’s a very fundamental attack on the U.S. And it has to be taken seriously, and Trump is not doing his job,” Nadler said. “What if Roosevelt had said, after Pearl Harbor, ‘We’re not sure who did it. Maybe it was the Chinese. Maybe it was somebody else’? And used that as an excuse not to respond?”
So, I asked, is that an impeachable offense? “Potentially,” he answered. “He is not carrying out his duties.” Then again, Nadler added, “Impeachment is a political act, and you have to make a lot of judgments. Is it an impeachable offense if he persists in not doing his office? Yeah, I’d say it is. But just because it’s an impeachable offense does not mean he should be impeached. It’s a different judgment.”
A vocal and growing minority of House Democrats is not waiting for the results of Mueller’s investigation to make that judgment on impeaching Trump. Among Nadler’s colleagues, a resolution to begin the process of impeachment authored by Congressman Al Green, of Texas, has twice been put to a vote. In early December, it received fifty-eight Democratic votes. By mid-January, it was up to sixty-six votes, still far from the two hundred and eighteen needed for a House majority. Public support for such a move is higher. In a recent national poll, about forty-one per cent of Americans support impeachment, significantly more than the twenty-six per cent who backed such proceedings against Richard Nixon at the start of the Watergate hearings, which eventually led to Nixon’s downfall.
Watergate revivalism, in fact, is booming among a certain cohort of Trump-loathing liberals, and a smart Slate podcast called “Slow Burn” that excavated the history of Watergate for the millennial generation shot to the top of the Apple charts. When I recently appeared on a panel with Watergate veterans convened by Slate at the Watergate Hotel, there was a sold-out audience of several hundred who had shelled out twenty dollars a pop to listen to the reminiscences of the talk-show host Dick Cavett, the Nixon biographer Evan Thomas, and the journalist Elizabeth Drew, who chronicled the Nixon impeachment proceedings for this magazine. The Trump era, short as it is, has already spawned its own literature of impeachment to add to the Watergate shelves, including “The Case for Impeachment,” a best-seller by the American University professor Allan Lichtman, and “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” by the Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, a former adviser to President Obama.
There is also an active and increasingly loud impeachment lobby led by the billionaire activist Tom Steyer, a San Francisco businessman who has already spent more than thirty million dollars on a public campaign calling for Congress to remove Trump from office. Since launching in October, his group, Need to Impeach, has acquired close to five million online signatures for its impeachment petition. TV ads feature Steyer looking into the camera, with the White House in the background, recounting a varied litany of complaints about Trump. An early ad said, “Donald Trump has brought us to the brink of nuclear war, obstructed justice, and taken money from foreign governments. We need to impeach this dangerous President.” A more current version reels off the indictments already obtained by Mueller’s investigators and concludes, “No President is above the law.”
When we spoke last week, Steyer seemed almost agnostic about the official reasons Congress should cite for Trump’s impeachment. He told me he was convinced that new and compelling evidence would emerge to bolster the political case for removing the President from office. Steyer said that he felt no need to wait for the results of Mueller’s investigation and was responding to the political reality that it can take a long time, as it did during Watergate, to get the American people to accept the radical step of removing a President from office. “We started this knowing it’s a marathon and not a sprint,” Steyer told me. “And that it has to do with the information reaching the American people so that people understand this is a deeply unfit and dangerous American President.”
But Steyer’s rallying of the Trump-hating party base has put him at odds with Nadler and other Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, who believe it is both premature and politically damaging to call for impeachment now. The House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, a fellow-Californian, called Steyer—a huge party benefactor, who contributed more than sixty million dollars to the Party’s candidates and causes in 2016—to lobby him directly against the impeachment drive, the Times reported. Bernie Sanders has publicly pleaded with Steyer and others to avoid “jumping the gun” and pushing for Trump’s removal before it’s possible to achieve it. Other Democrats, especially the campaign strategists who have to advise the Party’s candidates in the midterm elections, fear that impeachment is a political loser with voters, who will cast ballots on more traditional pocketbook issues.
Steyer is well aware of the criticism. He said he knew that the numbers in Congress, for now, are against him. “How that works out, exactly, I don’t know,” he told me. “But I would also quote Nelson Mandela: ‘Everything is impossible until it happens.’ We are saying something that is incredibly important to the people of the United States. We understand there’s a concern that it does not suit the short-term needs of some elected officials. I understand that they’ve got to try and figure that out.”
Jerry Nadler is still figuring it out. “My view of impeachment is to be very careful about impeachment,” he told me. Since succeeding Conyers in the House Judiciary Committee post, he’s been raising his profile, appearing as a talking head on MSNBC and CNN, attacking Trump, and talking as though the President is a genuine menace to the nation. But that doesn’t mean Nadler is ready to call for impeachment, at least not yet. He considers Steyer’s Need to Impeach campaign “premature at best,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s constructive. We don’t have the evidence now that would be convincing enough to people to justify impeachment.” As a political matter, Nadler added, “I don’t think the election campaign should be fought on the basis of impeachment or no impeachment. We’ve got plenty of problems in the country, and I don’t think it helps the country, never mind the Democrats. We should, though, fight the election on the grounds of whether the President is a good or a terrible President.”
Nadler comes from a safely Democratic district and has never had a competitive race since he first won his seat, in a special election, in 1992. But political calculation dominated our conversations about whether and how the impeachment of Trump could proceed. In Nadler’s reading of history, Nixon was forced from office because Democrats enlisted enough Republicans in the impeachment case to make Nixon’s presumed conviction in the Senate, by a two-thirds majority, likely; then and only then did Nixon step aside. In the Clinton case, conversely, Democrats stuck together and voted en masse against the House impeachment, and Republicans were unable to secure a conviction on the basis of just their own party’s votes in the Senate. Nadler warned of a “partisan coup d’état” against Clinton on the House floor, but, in the end, the political math didn't favor it.
The Clinton impeachment shapes how Nadler views a prospective case against Trump. “I said this on the floor of the House in 1998, and I meant it: impeachment must not be partisan,” Nadler told me. “And that’s true for two reasons. Number one, simple arithmetic. Let’s assume the Democrats get a majority of the House in the election, and let’s assume you vote impeachment on a partisan basis: all the Democrats voted for it; all the Republicans voted against it. Yes, you could impeach the President in the House. But you need a two-thirds vote in the Senate, and what’s the point of it? If you’re going to impeach him, you ought to be pretty sure you can convict him and remove him from office, and you should have good reasons for doing so.”
Removing the President is a dramatic move against the popular will; in effect, Nadler said, “you are nullifying the last election,” which is not something to be undertaken “without having buy-in, at least by the end of the process, by an appreciable fraction” of Republicans as well as Democrats. The alternative? “Twenty or thirty years of recriminations. Of almost half the country saying, ‘We won the election; you stole it from us.’ You don’t want to do that. Which means you should not impeach the President unless you really believe that, by the end of the process, you will have not only Democrats agreeing with you but a good fraction of the people who voted for him.”
There’s also the matter of evidence, and just what the charges would be against Trump. In the Clinton case, Nadler argued that Presidential perjury about a sexual affair did not rise to the level of impropriety envisioned in the Constitution, and he successfully urged Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on just what would constitute an impeachable offense, an exercise that convinced him that “the real test for an impeachable offense is, is this a threat to the constitutional order, to the protection of liberty, to the checks and balances system that the Constitution sets up?” He told me, “The impeachment clause was put into the Constitution as a political tool with which to defend the republic, to defend the constitutional order, to defend against a would-be tyrant.”
Those are strong words, and I found myself wondering whether Nadler really expected the case against Trump to rise someday to the grave standard he was setting for it. Does he think Trump is a tyrant, or that he could become one? Our back-and-forth on the matter left me feeling unclear, though it is certainly conventional wisdom in both parties these days that Democrats, given the House majority, are all but certain to proceed with some kind of case against Trump. (“This impeachment threat is out there,” a Fox News commentator named Liz Peek warned the crowd at last week’s CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives, according to the Washington Post. “It’s a very good reason to go vote, and to give money.”)
Still, Nadler insisted to me that he was not prepared to go forward with impeachment just because angry Democrats demand it, or even because he viewed Trump as unfit for office. “You don’t decide to impeach the President for the hell of it,” he told me. In dealing with Trump, Nadler said he expected that Mueller, like previous special counsels before him in the Clinton and Nixon cases, would deliver a report to Congress laying out his evidence related to the President, and he promised it would have to be sufficiently serious and specific. “To initiate impeachment, we would have to be convinced—I would certainly have to be convinced if I were going to help lead it—that the President has committed impeachable offenses, and that those impeachable offenses are so serious that the constitutional order is threatened if he is not impeached and removed from office,” Nadler said. “That’s the real test.”
I asked whether Trump’s firing of Comey obstructed the F.B.I. investigation into possible Trump-campaign collusion with Russia. Would that meet the standard for an impeachable offense? At first, Nadler demurred, saying he was “not a judge and not a jury right now.” But he signalled that his stance could change. Nadler added, tantalizingly, that he had consulted both public evidence and still-secret documents. “It may be that you can make a very serious case against the President,” he told me. “And I stress the word ‘may be.’ ”
