Imagine that it’s January 2027 and Democrats hold both chambers of Congress. They’ve been elected in a wave of public outrage over inflation, the war in Iran, and — crucially — public corruption. In fact, a Fox News poll taken shortly before the election showed that “corruption in government” was the top concern of voters, even greater than inflation.
How should the Democratic majority respond?
Last week Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, shared her thoughts about this, and it made parts of the right very, very angry.
During a discussion at the University of Chicago, Slotkin argued that a Democratic-controlled Congress should impose accountability on the Trump administration, but also that it can’t become the “whole personality” of the Congress.
And so, she proposed, Congress should “pick signature cases and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.” She acknowledged the two failed impeachments of President Trump, but said, “The people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who did his bidding.”
Here’s the part that made the right truly mad: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
The Chicago Thinker, a self-described conservative and libertarian student-run publication from the University of Chicago, clipped the latter portion of her comments and ignited a firestorm.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that Slotkin was “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign that goes after all and sundry, including what she calls ‘people who enabled’ Mr. Trump.”
A group called the Center to Advance Security in America even went so far as to file an ethics complaint against Senator Slotkin, claiming that she may have been trying to intimidate young Americans from pursuing careers in public service.
Others just lied. Greg Price, a MAGA influencer with a large following on X, said that Slotkin “just said that he [sic] wants to prosecute everyone who works for President Trump.”
Different others threatened her. Mike Davis, a prominent Republican lawyer and former clerk of Justice Neil Gorsuch, posted on X, “Try it, @ElissaSlotkin. Learn about the Second Amendment, sweetheart.”
Jesse Kelly, a talk radio host who also has an immense following on X, wrote, “Elissa Slotkin should be arrested for what she said. These are the kinds of things we have to do to communists in order to stop this from escalating.”
“Crush this before it gets worse,” he said.
The hysteria was so out of proportion to Slotkin’s comments, that it’s worth pondering whether this was Trumpists’ own exercise in “deterrence.” They’re trying to deter accountability for MAGA’s immense corruption.
In reality, however, Slotkin was raising the right question and — by focusing on the “signature” cases — in the right way. How should a Democratic Congress respond to the extraordinary corruption of the Trump White House? And what can it do if President Trump is essentially immune to prosecution and impeaching the president has already failed, twice?
Her top-line answer is sound — pick the most egregious cases and pursue his enablers. But the default method should be impeachment rather than prosecution. Done correctly, impeachment can be more unifying and more effective than a campaign of criminal prosecution.
In fact, a campaign of criminal prosecution may well be impossible. Prepare for Trump to issue a host of pre-emptive pardons, protecting everyone from his family to his cabinet to his most senior advisers from criminal liability for any federal crimes committed in office or near one.
In other words, Trump may use the most misguided provision of the Constitution — the pardon power — to wreck the rule of law. In response, Democrats and Republicans should revive the impeachment power, the most underused portion of the Constitution, to save both the rule of law and the structure of our government.
First, let’s talk a bit about the law. Any efforts to prosecute Trump or his enablers criminally will run up against three roadblocks. Two are obvious, one is less so.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives the president the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” This power is one of the last vestiges of royalty given to the American president, and its reach is limited only by his or her integrity.
Trump now understands this reality fully, and no one should doubt his willingness to exercise his power to the fullest.
As Joe Biden demonstrated (in one of the worst moves of his presidency) the power to pardon can even be pre-emptive, granting pardons for cases that might be brought. It extends to people inside and outside the government, and it can grant total immunity from legal accountability for even the most heinous of federal crimes.
The second barrier to prosecution is unique to the presidency: Trump v. United States — the most misguided Supreme Court decision of the new century. As I’ve argued before, an otherwise originalist court reached a decidedly un-originalist decision to grant former presidents sweeping immunity for actions undertaken in office. The immunity isn’t absolute, but it’s broad enough to make any post-term prosecution of a president extraordinarily difficult.
The final barrier is both legal and practical. Proving a public corruption case is hard, and it’s getting harder. For example, in a 2016 case, McDonnell v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a former Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell. He and his wife received roughly $175,000 in loans and gifts from a businessman named Jonnie R. Williams Sr.
The court found that the government had not proven that McDonnell had committed any “official acts” in exchange for a financial benefit. McDonnell had set up meetings between Williams and Virginia public officials, had hosted events benefiting Williams’s company at the governor’s mansion, and had contacted other Virginia officials on Williams’s behalf.
Those were not official acts, the court reasoned, because “to qualify as an ‘official act,’ the public official must make a decision or take an action on that ‘question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy,’ or agree to do so.”
A later case, called Snyder v. United States, reversed the conviction of James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Ind. He received a gift of $13,000 from a truck dealer after Snyder spent more than $1 million at the dealership to purchase garbage trucks for the city.
The Supreme Court found that Snyder had received a “gratuity,” not a bribe, and the relevant federal statute criminalized bribery, and did not criminalize granting a gratuity after a favorable decision had been made.
Taken together, these decisions opened up an immense gray zone for financial influence, leaving bribery prosecutions viable in only the most brazen of cases.
I bring up these cases not because they foreclose any prosecution of Trump officials, but rather because they show that simply proving that money changed hands under suspicious or plainly immoral circumstances is not the same thing as proving a crime.
What this means in practice is that public corruption cases should be brought, but they must be brought carefully and selectively, when the law is clear and the evidence is overwhelming.
There could be plenty of those to go around — but only if Trump stays his hand on pardons. And he almost certainly won’t.
But impeachment is different. It’s a political remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors” that involve violations of the public trust, not just violations of the law. And it has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”
The impeachment power is also broad. It extends to the president, vice president and all “civil officers” of the United States. While the term “civil officer” isn’t defined by the Constitution, it almost certainly extends to cabinet heads, ambassadors, other senior executive branch officials and federal judges.
In fact, a number of federal judges have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office in American history.
While we know that it is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Republicans will cross the aisle to vote to impeach and convict Trump, would they have the same loyalty to, say, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently deposed ambassador to Greece who The Wall Street Journal reported had solicited a substantial from gift from a Republican donor before her Senate confirmation?
Does that loyalty extend to Richard Grenell, the special missions envoy who’s worn a number of hats during both Trump administrations and who’s embroiled in his own pay-to-play scandal after Alina Habba Mildon, the president’s former lawyer who went on to work at the Department of Justice, accused him of siphoning off millions of dollars intended for a donation to the Kennedy Center, which he ran at the time? (Grenell denies any wrongdoing.)
Does that loyalty extend to Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who’d already committed an impeachable offense when he disclosed military plans on unclassified Signal group chats and hasn’t slowed down since?
As I was writing this edition of the newsletter, news broke that Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire from Venezuela, retained Mildon last year for a four-year period with a compensation package worth more than $50 million. He received a pardon from Trump shortly afterward. (Habba, too, denies any wrongdoing.)
Herrera had been charged with felony bribery, but negotiated a plea deal for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But even that was too much for him to bear.
These incidents are but the tip of the iceberg of corruption, the real Trump tower. In May, Isaac Saul, the founder of Tangle, an online journal, published a comprehensive piece called “The Everything, Everywhere, All at Once Corruption Story” that attempted to provide a complete account of the Trump administration’s self-dealing.
It’s a sobering read, and it’s already out of date. The scandals just keep coming.
The list of people who’ve committed impeachable offenses may be long, but the number who actually face impeachment should be relatively small. As Slotkin argued, accountability can’t be the whole personality of Congress.
But here is the question: If the Republicans lose their congressional majorities, and if public corruption is a principal concern of the voting public, then why shouldn’t Democrats make Republicans take difficult votes to protect many of the most corrupt and unpopular people in American politics?
And if Republicans do start to regain their senses, then some may find it in their own interests to purge their party of its most corrupt figures, the very people who squandered the Republican Party’s victory in 2024 and put the party on a path to defeat in 2026.
I understand the concerns around what Slotkin said. Her comment about deterring young people from joining the administration — especially taken out of its larger context regarding focusing on “signature” or “egregious” cases — looked like a blanket warning against government service under Trump.
And I am partly persuaded by smart and wise people like my friend Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department official and Harvard Law professor, who fears an escalating tit-for-tat of political prosecutions. That’s why prosecutions should be selective, undertaken (as I said and as Slotkin did, too) in the most egregious cases with the most obvious facts.
At the same time, however, it is political and moral and cultural malpractice to answer the public’s righteous demand for accountability with silence and inaction.
The fear of mutual escalation cannot be used to turn government service into a law-free zone, where unscrupulous actors can exploit the public trust, enrich themselves and harm the Republic — and then, when their misdeeds are discovered, demand leniency because accountability is somehow just too dangerous and destabilizing.
That’s why impeachment is the ideal response. You are not threatening a person’s liberty. Impeachment doesn’t send anyone to jail. But you are exposing their corruption through both a public investigation and a public trial and imposing the most effective punishment for a democratic government, banning them from federal service.
In addition, impeachment would serve a separate salutary purpose; it would put Congress back in the driver’s seat of the American government.
I don’t want young people deterred from public service. I do want them deterred from public corruption, and I want America spared from Trump’s grotesque rerun of the Gilded Age.
Some other things I did
I was traveling last week and missed my Sunday column, but I thought I’d share a great conversation from last Friday. Jill Lepore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, hosted a discussion about the state of the media on America’s 250th birthday. I was onstage with Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First and Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
One of the most important questions centered around the state of local journalism. Why are so few people tuning in? Here was my response:
We have a market problem. And the market problem is that people in local communities are more thinking about national news. And so if you offer local news, they’re not as interested.
And this is something like if I had to write my book again where I was talking about solutions to our national polarization, one thing that I urged was people to get more involved locally.
Well, after I wrote the book, there was a big wave of local activism in the South, but it was all over a national issue, which is eliminating, purging, CRT, critical race theory, from its [fictional] prevalence in rural southern school districts.
And so, you began to have a situation where people were using local races to fight national issues and that there was less interest in a local issue or in a local publication unless it had an opinion on a national issue.
You can watch the whole thing here.
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The post Impeachment. It’s Not Just for Presidents. appeared first on New York Times.
