This is one of the most polarizing political questions of the moment. To Donald Trump’s opponents, the answer is laughably obvious: Of course congressional Republicans aren’t doing enough to hold the president accountable, they argue. Most GOP lawmakers are bending over backwards to excuse and ignore Trump’s bad behavior, while those few who do routinely speak out are still voting with him 93.5 percent of the time. They are all talk and no action: corrupt partisans posing as leaders.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, a popular genre of GOP apologia has emerged to contend that Republicans are being held to an unrealistic standard; that in fact they’ve already done plenty to stand up to Trump. Sure, they’ve voted for conservative bills, the reasoning goes—they are conservatives, after all! But that doesn’t mean their public criticism of a Republican president can be dismissed. As the conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru recently put it: “They’re falling pitifully short only if the baseline expectation is that they do whatever liberal journalists think it’s their duty to do.” [...]
Virtually everyone I talked to agreed that the single most important thing congressional Republicans can do right now is to stop the president from shutting down Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump’s critics contend that any effort by the White House to meddle with the probe would represent a brazen affront to the rule of law. [...]
But impeachment threats wouldn’t necessarily just be about getting tough on Trump—they could also be a way for congressional Republicans to hold themselves accountable. After all, it’s easy to rationalize keeping your head down and staying quiet while a scandal engulfs the White House. It becomes harder to let yourself off the hook if you’re publicly on the record saying that this particular scandal would be an impeachable offense—and legislators can justify tough votes to angry constituents by saying that they’re bound by their public commitments.
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