Progressive New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait writing for the leftist New Republic in 2010 prophesied that if the Republicans took Congress that year and Obama won a second term two years after, “the House will vote to impeach him before he leaves office.” He was confident enough to make such a prediction because that is post-Nixon politics; they got our guy, we’ll get your guy. After Clinton’s unsuccessful turn of being the next “your guy”, we spent the eight Bush II years listening to all the same Hitler comparisons while the D’s dreamed up ways to impeach W, hoping to at least pin some “war crimes” to his record.
What Chait wrote in 2010 about Obama wasn’t truly about Obama; it was the rather obvious statement of the state of American politics.
Wait, you say. What will they impeach him over? You can always find something.
I really don’t mean to make politics intrusive in this way, not the least of which because in my view there isn’t nearly enough difference R to D, or D to R. They fight each other for turf and nothing changes as a result.
The flurry of hysterics today forces at least some political equation to be front and center for our analysis. It may seem like markets are increasingly uneasy about a Trump impeachment, but I think that is the wrong political framing. Putting growing market pessimism into the context of “reflation”, what is more likely driving anti-reflation today in particular is not that Trump may be gone by vote of Congress but rather that he will be seriously wounded politically such that all the various things “reflation” was counting on are less likely to ever happen.
Tax reform? Impeach Trump. Replace Obamacare? Impeach Trump. Gutting the regulatory state? Impeach Trump. Democrats under that glare of mainstream media perspective will be hard pressed to work in any bipartisan consensus to do what is really necessary. Reform the global monetary system? It was a dream of a dream long shot in November, now there is no chance at all. I doubt there is any way the President could even fire Janet Yellen now, not that it would really matter.
