Your bag is empty.
In the House of Representatives, there are over four hundred members and all of their names glow white on the back wall, above an ancient clock and the American flag that drips above the Speaker’s chair. On the day of the vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, PLAYBOY sat in the gallery, watching the names shimmering on the wall and the votes coming in.
The House was voting on the newly defined impeachment rules, which Republicans have been demanding for a month. The measure passed along party lines, 232 to 196. Stephen Colbert would say on his show that night, not every day can we say that we as a people witnessed history, before pivoting to reminisce on the Washington Nationals’ World Series championship.
The impeachment inquiry is growing complicated, it’s growing more serious. The Committees tasked with investigating the impeachment of the president have been hauling his subordinates and associates before them for weeks. Each day on Capitol Hill, the space outside the secured room where the committees meet is swollen with reporters. When a congressman leaves the room, they dog him like fans outside a football game, pesking him for a quote instead of an autograph. And each remark that these members of Congress make outside that room feels a bit like an autograph on the state of impeachment. The Republicans decry some process underway in the secret space behind the doors; a space that reportedly smells like too many bodies sweating through uncomfortable suits. The Democrats emerge talking in metaphors, everything is a smoking gun or a lessening of the Constitution. The Republicans emerge talking in different metaphors, everything is a witch hunt.
Impeachment is a slow process and every time Congress settles into it, they reinvent this process. Under Clinton, the Special Counsel conducted an investigation and they impeached the president on what they could find in that document; the Judiciary Committee didn’t conduct an investigation.
We are exhausted, we sit in the shady corners of bars in Washington DC and wonder which will come first: the 2020 election or the official impeachment of Donald Trump.
This time, the impeachment is being conducted behind those closed doors; which, if you’re curious, are cherry-wood red. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has hauled in every single figure he can find with a story to tell. Members of Congress are not even allowed to have their cell phones in the secured room where the witnesses testify. At the beginning of each session, Republican Congressman Jim Jordan reads his opening statement, which is mostly a boilerplate rant that bashes on about “witch hunts” and other nonspecific evils that haunt the president. In a recently released testimony, Jordan complained “if it’s an official impeachment inquiry, we should be following precedent. Every recent impeachment has permitted minority subpoenas.” But it’s unclear who the Republicans in the minority are hoping to subpoena and it’s worth remembering that, in this inquiry, subpoenas go largely ignored under orders from Pennsylvania Avenue.
Just before the impeachment inquiry was officially formalized with that vote on the floor of the House, PLAYBOY obtained the Democrats’ talking points on the process. These broke down neatly into two categories: what the President is documented to have done and what this impeachment process will show that he has done. They say that Trump has put our national security at risk, undermined our elections and abused his power. The talking points read, “we will proceed with the seriousness that this moment in history demands. We will conduct a methodical, thorough and factual investigation to follow the facts and uncover the extent to which Trump’s action threatened our national security and the extent of the cover-up.”
In that internal email, the Democrats promised, “while the Committees are currently in an investigative phase, there will be open hearings and transcripts will be released.”
When those transcripts were finally released, they were not kind to Donald Trump. The former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine said that she feared for her safety and that she was removed quickly from her post because the State Department was trying to pull her out before the president tweeted. Republicans have been demanding the release of those transcripts.
Democrats seem to have a never-ending list of witnesses that they will call before their committees. In September, at a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, Financial Services Chairman Eliot Engel told his colleagues that “people are coming out of the woodwork like you wouldn’t believe to spill their guts on this.”
This is how the impeachment process seems destined to play out. Each witness will outline the moves that Trump has made that would be out-of-bounds for any other president. How he withheld foreign aid for election interference — the quid pro quo that glares across the CNN chyrons with a frequency that can only be interpreted as the exhuming of a dead language.
We are exhausted, we sit in the shady corners of bars in Washington DC and wonder which will come first: the 2020 election or the official impeachment of Donald Trump. Outside of the beltway, people seem to know the names of every ranking member of Congress, which is never a good sign.
The outside figure in impeachment is Donald Trump who sits fuming in the White House while his loudest supporters, white men with white names like Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio or Mark Meadows of North Carolina battle for him on Capitol Hill. Republicans are playing defense in the lower chamber, which mostly amounts to them constantly calling fouls on the Democrats. They insist that the Democrats aren’t obeying the rules or that the Democrats are conducting this whole thing in secret. Because they are in the minority, it feels very much like their backs are against the wall in the same way that the Democratic minority in the Senate spends almost all of their oxygen accusing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of playing dirty.
We are now less than a year away from the general election in which Donald Trump will face whichever Democrat emerges from their crowded field. The next year promises to be a rough jab-and-uppercut of news cycles that toggle between impeachment and the well-worn campaign trail. In Washington, among the political junkies, we knew always that impeachment would come in the spring. But there is no clear sunset for this moment in our history, we don’t know when the credits will roll and we don’t know exactly which names will be near the top.
If nothing else, Democrats have handed Donald Trump his ammunition for that next year. He can attack their party for trying to remove him from office and trying to undermine the ballots cast across America in November of 2016. And Democrats will be dogged on the campaign trail over that next year as the shadow of impeachment hangs over them — the double narrative plays strong even in the media deserts.
And in Washington, all we can do is look to the next year and hope that we will be able to suffer through it all.