“Clinton opened the door, and Trump just walked through.”

One of the rhetorical puzzles in our current situation is how people who advocated impeaching Clinton now argue that impeaching Trump would be nothing more than trying to undo the 2016, and is therefore not a legitimate position. There was a similar puzzle during the Clinton impeachment trial as to how people who hadn’t wanted Reagan impeached (for the Iran-Contra decisions) did want to impeach Clinton. It’s a little hard to say that they had a principled position about impeachment, and there certainly was the accusation that it was nothing more than trying to undo the 1994 election.

While, with every case, there are and were people operating on the basis of principles they applied across faction, at play in every case were open statements of sheer factionalism on various sides, justified (sometimes pre-emptively) by the factionalism of “the other side.” Impeaching Clinton was justified because “Democrats” would do the same. Refusing to consider impeaching Trump, regardless of the evidence, is justified because “they did it too.”

In other words, “They did it too, and so it’s okay for us to do it” (with “it” being “pretending to have principles while acting out of purely factional motives”). Thus, factionalism is justified by factionalism (“it’s okay to be this factional because the other faction was this factional first or would be this factional if they had the chance”).

The line that I’m hearing (and reading) on this is: “Clinton opened the door, and Trump walked through.” Sometimes it’s “The Dems opened the door, and Trump walked through.” The argument is that the defense of Clinton was nothing but factionalism, as any principled person would have voted (or did vote for) conviction; thus, Trump supporters believe that they have a “get out of impeachment free” card since Dems did it first.

What’s interesting to me about this defense—it’s okay for us to do it because you did it first—is that it’s engaged in by people who raised children.

Anyone who had siblings, who raised more than one child, or even just spent an entire day with multiple children knows that it’s just a question of time till you have this conversation:

You: “Stop hitting Alex!”
Terry: “Alex hit me first!”
Alex: “Well, Terry stole my cookie!”
Terry: “Terry stole my bike yesterday!”

If you let it go on, they will be arguing about events that happened in the Pleistocene.

How many adults under those circumstances say, “Well, Alex, you opened the door and Terry walked through!”?

I’ll wager few or none.

No sensible parent would say that because saying that “you opened the door and Terry walked through” is either opens the door to a world of tit-for-tat, in which case that parent is going to have to go through that whole history of injuries to one another to determine what the score is. Or else they are saying  “Well, this kid hit the other, so now hitting is okay” is a family choosing to live in a world of violence, theft, and anarchy.

Sensible parents respond in one of two ways.
1) They say, “I don’t care who started it. It stops now.”
2) They try to look into situation and figure out the rights and wrongs, being fair to both children, and not immediately taking the side of one child.

Most parents do the former. Sometimes they say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” meaning that Alex hitting Terry doesn’t make Terry hitting Alex right, because hitting is still wrong.

Personally, I think Clinton should have been censured. But, I’m not Queen of the Universe. One thing that is true, though, is that the failure to convict was not factional. Five to ten Republicans voted against the articles of impeachment.

But, here is the more important point:
1) we can decide that Clinton (or Reagan) “opened a door” and that no President should ever be impeached;
2) we can admit that we only want out-group Presidents impeached, and that we reason entirely factionally;
3) we can look into the rights and wrongs, weigh the various things that Reagan, Clinton, and Trump did, and try figure out the math of the tit-for-tat;
4) we can say that we don’t care who started it; treating impeachment as a purely factional issue stops now.

The first and second put us in a world of hell, and it doesn’t matter if the other side does it too. That the other side reasons rabidly factionally doesn’t make our rabid factionalism okay—two wrongs don’t make a right.

We’re all still in a world in which we need sensible policies, and hating the other side doesn’t get us sensible policies.

The third is complicated, time-consuming, and, in the long run, does it matter? We can spend a lot of time arguing about the tits and tats of Reagan v. Clinton. But would that math change what we should do now? Would it change how you, as the adult in the room, managed the kids hitting each other?

I mentioned earlier that the “it” in this case is reasoning and acting entirely in service of our faction. If we choose to behave the way most sensible adults do, that would mean that we, all of us, assess carefully the accusations against Trump, and, if we like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an out-group President, and, if we don’t like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an in-group President. (So, Dems and Republicans should ask: if Obama had done these things, would we have advocated impeachment?)

Our whole political world right now is tainted by the genetic fallacy, in which you reject information on the grounds that it came from a “biased” source (by which you mean “the other side”). That’s is a fallacy with damaging political consequences—making a good decision should always involve listening to other points of view.

Making a reasonable decision about the accusations against Trump means reading “the other side”—directly, not relying on mediated versions (and not relying on the “other side” spokesperson on your otherwise factional media, so watching the clips that Rachel Maddow presents or watching Shepard Smith doesn’t count).

Neither Clinton nor Reagan opened a door. If what you’re doing is unethical, that someone else did it doesn’t magically transform it into ethical. Wrong remains wrong.