Xjyuk

"What is accomplished" depends on whether you look at impeachment as a process that is strictly evaluated on partisan political gain, or whether you view it under its intended framework - as a tool for a co-equal branch of government to reign in potential abuses by the Executive Branch.

If the President has committed abuses of the powers of office, removing him upholds the oath of office and duty to the Constitution that every Congressional member swore when taking office. It reigns in, punishes and discourages future abuses of office.

Whether that helps them or not in the next election SHOULD be secondary considerations for public servants who pretend to be statesmen/women. Sadly, it isn't, but that is how it is supposed to be, so questioning the value is to question the fundamental design of our democratic institution of divided, co-equal branches of government checking and balancing each other.

At the very least, if you think the party leadership is only interested in selfish, short-term gain, then consider the backlash among the voters who want their government to serve them, if they sit back and do nothing in response to a growing pile of abuses, because "it will help us win the next election." Voter enthusiasm FOR one's party is what drives turnout. If you are viewed as intentionally enabling the "evildoers," you lose the ability to be seen as an alternative in the eyes of the voters - you're just a different aspect of the problem. It may be that Pelosi feels she has no choice but to act.

There are two levels on which to consider the question:

On the partisan level, it is not at all clear that an impeachment process will benefit the Republicans. Trump keeps shouting that this does, but his word is worthless. Each Republican senator will be forced to either vote against Trump or go on record voting to support someone being accused of soliciting foreign powers to attack his campaign opponents. That will be used against them in future elections.

On the historic level, each president helps to set the standard of behavior for future presidents. If you let Trump's actions go without punishing them, then you are giving a green light to future presidents to do the same thing. If you want to send a message that this kind of behavior is unacceptable, then you have to punish Trump (or try to) to set an example.

And about Mike Pence, maybe he will help the GOP in office or maybe not. He is close enough to Trump to be politically damaged by the process. But more importantly, he is less likely to make completely lunatic moves that might drag us into a war, nuclear or otherwise.

Arguments very much like as yours could have been brought against impeaching Clinton.

1. His VP, Al Gore, a career politician, well-liked by Democrats, would have taken over. (Does it even matter what the name of the VP is in this argument, actually?)


2. They fail to impeach Clinton and give his party/VP a boost for the next elections. (Only because Clinton couldn't run.) [Counterfactual.]

So this is arguing that impeachment is always useless, basically. In reality the halo effect makes arguments like this highly doubtful.

• A successful impeachment (or equivalently a resignation under impeachment) would be a huge PR win for the opposition. Look what happened with Nixon and the Republicans in the immediate aftermath (Ford lost to Carter).




• Even a failed impeachment is not without some advantages. It monopolizes the public attention on (presumably) the worst aspects of the other side of the political divide. It also mobilizes their own base to the polls. Gore lost to Bush, even though Clinton rode pretty high in the opinion polls, especially during the impeachment itself. Nevertheless Gore felt that Clinton was too damaged politically, and so didn't campaign on Clinton's coattails.

Of course, there are other issues at stake in subsequent elections. But one can easily "prove" that impeaching a president wins the next presidential election for the opposition with simplistic arguments of the kind you've made.

And to address a subsequent comment, which can be summarized as "why now?": in case you didn't realize, they aren't actually impeaching Trump. I mean, this is CNN saying:

So in the end, what's changed? Not a whole lot, other than Pelosi formally endorsing an impeachment inquiry. But for the past couple months, the House Judiciary Committee has made the case that it was already conducting an impeachment inquiry with the goal of deciding whether to vote on articles of impeachment. There will not be a separate vote to open up an impeachment inquiry, Democrats say. Pelosi would not give a timeframe over this process but she told her colleagues it would be done "expeditiously," and Nadler has hoped to conclude it by the end of the year.

I suspect that dragging the investigation(s) is beneficial for the Democrats. They can either say closer to the election "look we're just dropping it, because there's not enough time to finish the process, let the electorate decide". Alternatively, they could find enough dirt with all the subpoenas to really damage him in the public eye, even if not convince enough Republican Senators.

Basically it's about conveying the message they are taking (concrete?) steps:

“He’s taken it to another level of betrayal, therefore we’re moving forward with another level of inquiry," Pelosi said.

I believe there is an option 3: impeachment proceedings force senators to go on the book about whether or not they believe the actions of the president are worthy of removal from office or not. This provides ammunition for upcoming elections in 2020 where vulnerable seats, e.g. Susan Collins, can be targeted based upon how they vote.

Having a hard vote on whether or not the behavior is acceptable for the office of the president will be important ammunition in the upcoming elections. As the Democrats found out in the waning Obama years, control of The Senate is crucial to actually getting legislature passed. Since gaining control the Senate Majority Leader has routinely refused to present for vote anything that does not have majority support from the Senate Republicans, which includes much of the Democrats' legislative agenda.

In short, the goal of the impeachment proceedings is most likely to gain a majority in The Senate.

Surprisingly little. Impeachment isn't meant to be a partisan tool, it is a constitutional mandate for the checks-and-balances of our government to work properly. The Speaker is duty-bound by her oath of office to bring impeachment hearings when the President has committed actions unbecoming of his office.

The reason why she has avoided beginning impeachment up to this point, though? That part is intensely partisan. As the de-facto leader of the Democrats in the House, part of her job is to make sure the Democrats have a majority to be able to push through their agendas. Impeachment is severely unpopular with the American people, and has a strong history of causing the party of the President being impeached to actually gain in power. So by fulfilling her sworn duty as Speaker, she's failing in her duty of preserving Democrat supremacy in the House.

TL;DR? It's a bunch of slimy politicians being forced to do what's right instead of what's advantageous.

They maintain party unity.

The left wing of the Democratic party has been calling for impeachment for a long time. The more evidence there is against Trump, the stronger their calls become, until the party leadership starts to face a serious risk of fracturing the party by resisting, which would be a disaster this close to the 2020 elections.

It's been made very clear, at this point, what the point is. Democratic party is involved in a not-too-subtle conspiracy to cover up their own criminal conduct.

Maybe "cover up" is too strong a word. Deflection may be a better way to describe it.

The recipe has been repeated a number of times now. It consists of the following steps:

1. Identify a potentially criminal conduct by a former member of the Obama administration.


2. Identify the most damaging keywords associated with the conduct.


3. Pick a behavior of Trump, or someone in his inner circle, which may be described by those same keywords if one were to use an extreme poetic license.


4. Do not defend the criminal behavior of the Obama's functionaries. Instead, simply repeat time and again the keywords to claim a form of righteous indignation in reference to Trump or Trump's functionaries.


5. Hope that the often repeated accusations become associated with Trump and that the parties actually guilty of the conduct (from the Obama administration) cannot be prosecuted or even challenged because describing their behavior involves using the keywords which are, in many people's mind, already triggering memories of the false accusations against Trump and Trump's functionaries.

It's worked so far. Some of the most prominent instances of it working are as following:

• Hillary Clinton got away with deliberately subverting any attempts to use Freedom of Information Act requests against her emails by using a private server.


• Joe Biden has used US foreign aid to Ukraine to stop the investigation of his son's corrupt enrichment in Ukraine.


• Hillary Clinton got away with using foreign spies to dig up dirt on Trump.

Impeachment is just part of the overblown rhetoric which is used to make the accusations, which the Democrats know to be false, sound interesting enough to burn them into people's memories. It makes them memorable by adding excitement to the otherwise-absurd statements.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

—Article II, Section 4

Should Trump or any other president be found guilty of a crime in an investigation tantamount to any of the above mentioned crimes, most of the cabinet can be gutted as they see fit.

This means that Pence would no longer become president, and the impeachment would provide value to those opposed to the administration.

One thing I don't see other answers bring up is that an impeachment investigation itself can uncover or provoke more damaging information or actions from the president.

For example, the Watergate investigation caused the Saturday Night Massacre, which is itself a blatant example of obstruction of justice. It also lead to the reveal of the Nixon tapes, which contained plenty of politically damaging information as well.

In the case of Clinton the Whitewater investigation eventually went far afield and got Clinton to testify in front of Congress about Monika Lewinsky with prosecutors like Starr and Kavanaugh formulating salacious questions either to force perjury or politically damaging truths out of Clinton. It's not clear how successful this was in the end, since the Clinton impeachment didn't have a conviction following it and the Republicans seemed to have suffered in the 98 midterms, but politically it can't be said that impeachment was 100% the wrong move for the Republicans, at worst it provoked Gore into distancing himself from Clinton and probably damaging his campaign in 2000.