This subject probably should be a tweet rather than a blog so apologies for using this medium to knock off a rapid reaction rather than compose a considered, researched view. But the double header of this morning’s Supreme Court judgement and this evening’s news from across the Atlantic of impeachment proceedings against President Trump perfectly illustrates how exaggerated is our reaction to issues in our back yard. Events with much greater significance for the futures of our children and grandchildren are taking place across the Atlantic.
Yes, the implications of this morning’s judgement are significant for whether or not we continue with the historic British pride in our unwritten constitution. But the real life fallout will be minimal, or at least confined to the UK, and will be superseded by the ultimate electoral consequences, i.e. can Johnson pull off his khaki election coup or not? By contrast, the real life fallout from the Democrats’ decision to initiate impeachment proceedings could be world changing.
A second term for Trump, whilst ultimately temporal and not irrevocable, would shift so many goalposts worldwide on so many issues – starting with the biggest of all (climate change) and going on to both the global balance of power with the east and the domestic US agenda on healthcare, civil rights, abortion, race relations, income inequality and so so much more. I actually remain optimistic that the electoral numbers should favour his opponent. This is a Presidential election for the Democrats to lose rather than a natural one for Republicans to win.
His base is no more than 40% at best and his reach beyond that is limited. Even at the heights of optimism about the US economy, his approval ratings scarcely moved out of that narrow range. Yet the US electoral college system is absurdly lop-sided and, as we saw in 2016 (and, to a lesser extent, in 2000 and – let us liberal JFK- worshipping progressive not forget – in 1960), it can let in the candidate with the lower electoral reach if just three or four states swing in his direction on a few tens of thousands of votes. So the main object has to be to avoid giving any edge to Trump’s populist message. Which is why Nancy Pelosi and the wise heads in the Democrat leadership have been pushing back on calls from activists for impeachment proceedings.
The parallels with the Clinton experience in the 1990s have been aired widely enough and are ominous. Once the impeachment genie is out of the bottle, there is no telling how effective Trump’s re-election team could be in using it to portray the Democrats as witch-hunting harpies. Prepare for some very nasty, thinly veiled racist attacks on the “squad” and on Democrats in general as an unAmerican group of vengeful socialists. This is the battle which will change the world. Not the Supreme Court’s judgement on the legality of Johnson’s prorogation. And this is the issue for which the world will remember 24th September 2019 long after the ruling of the UK’s Supreme Court has become a footnote in the textbooks of constitutional scholars.
Having said all of that, I still – crossing fingers massively and not wishing to tempt Fate – regard a Democrat victory next year as the more likely outcome. But it has just become horribly more messy and uncontrollable.
View from the Clapham Omnibus 