<em>The Atlantic</em> Politics Daily: Democrats Can’t Agree on the Reasons for Impeachment

How should swing-district Democrats be approaching impeachment? The Beltway insider narrative is that they should frantically try to distinguish themselves from their party’s moves, but that political calculus may be all wrong, writes Ronald Brownstein:

“But whether they support impeachment or not, their fate in 2020 may hinge less on their individual votes than on the country’s verdict on the overall impeachment process—and even more so on how it assesses Trump’s term in office.”

— Saahil Desai

Snapshot

(Veronica Cardenas / Reuters)

Jessica Cisneros, a Democrat running to challenge Representative Henry Cuellar in Texas, was endorsed today by fellow Justice Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Elaine Godfrey pressed Cisneros on her platform earlier this month.

Argument of the Day

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As the House’s impeachment inquiry ramps up, both critics and defenders have turned to the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause as their roadmap for the legal battles to come. But America’s politicians may be misinterpreting that phrase by searching for clear criminal violations of the law, Frank O. Bowman argues. It turns out the framers might have had a more sweeping definition in mind.

In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton made the larger point that impeachment is directed at “political” offenses that “proceed from … the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He was echoed by the foremost of the first generation of commentators on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story, who observed in his 1833 treatise Commentaries on the Constitution that impeachable conduct is often “purely political,” and that “no previous statute is necessary to authorize an impeachment for any official misconduct.”

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+ More from our Battle for the Constitution series: “The Trump administration has tended to adopt a posture of maximal presidential obstruction of congressional investigations into the conduct of the executive branch and the individuals surrounding it.”

Elsewhere

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🇨🇦Winning, but barely: “Justin Trudeau didn’t lose the Canadian federal election outright, but he had about as bad an outcome as possible short of that,” David Frum argues.

🇬🇧Brexit, now and forever: “This is a potentially seismic turning point in the Brexit drama, so long as the government can persuade all those MPs who have professed their support to stick with it,” Tom McTague writes from London.

About us: The Atlantic’s politics newsletter is a daily effort from our politics desk. Today’s edition was written by Saahil Desai, with help from Christian Paz, and edited by Shan Wang.

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Saahil Desai is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.

Christian Paz is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.