I thought that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was ridiculous. And I’ll go one step further: if the worst thing that Mueller finds on Trump is that Trump lied about an affair before a civil jury, then I don’t think Trump should be impeached either.
That’s why it’s strange to me that Ken Starr, who prosecuted Clinton, and Jonathan Turley, who testified in favor of impeaching Clinton, are leading the charge against Robert Mueller. If we use the standard they used for the impeachment of Clinton, then probably Trump should be impeached. If we use a more reasonable standard, then, well, I don’t know. It’s early to say, but given how much he’s lied about contact with Russia already, it’s likely that he’ll also lie, or already has lied, about it under oath. Whether those lies merit impeachment, or whether there are other issues beyond those lies, I can’t say yet.
It’s worth nothing noting that a higher percentage of the population supports impeaching Trump (PPP and Monmouth put it in the low-to-mid 40s) than supported impeaching Clinton (Gallup and NYT had it in the mid 30s).
There’s one more funny parallel I’d like to mention between the two impeachment cases. As Clinton’s impeachment case unfolded, it’s fair to say that the public generally opposed impeachment while the media generally favored it. Yet we never heard much about how it was bad to anger the public by impeaching an elected president. Now, we’re told again and again that even if Trump committed impeachable offenses, and even if a majority of the public approves of impeaching Trump, there’s still a danger in impeaching Trump because it will upset his base.
The reasoning is that Trump’s base supposedly consists largely of disillusioned members of the white working-class who haven’t gotten a fair shake in our economy. Gee, I wonder if there was a group of people who loved Bill Clinton and had every fight to feel disillusioned about how they had been treated historically in this country? But aside from the New Yorker article I linked to there, I never once heard that as an argument against impeaching Clinton.
If I were a Trumpite, I’d try to keep comparisons to Clinton’s impeachment to a minimum. But I hope that Starr and Turley are so broken up about the one that got away that they spend as much time on tv as they can, to remind viewers of what happened twenty years ago.