Election, impeachment -- election, impeachment: rinse, spin, repeat

We seem to have entered an era in which impeachment is just another arrow in the quivers of opposing political parties.  Kevin McCarthy’s announcement yesterday that House Republicans will begin impeachment hearings on Joe Biden, without a shred of evidence that he has done anything impeachable, was a surprise to exactly no one.  I will make an argument in a separate column that it shouldn’t worry Democrats and might even help President Biden as the year goes on.  But for now, not even the report of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Diet Coke and Halibut dinner with Defendant Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, during which she reportedly told him the impeachment investigation will be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden,” was new.  After all, it was Kevin “Sell My Soul For a Nickel” McCarthy who said this of the endless Benghazi hearings intended to roast Hillary Clinton on a spit: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

McCarthy’s mangling, tangling syntax aside, these new hearings are just Benghazi Redux, and Republicans may find that American citizens are more used to this kind of political gamesmanship that Republicans think. 

Ladies and gentleman, I present the recall election!  They happen all the time in small towns and counties all over the country.  Members of boards of supervisors are recalled, as are mayors – lots and lots of mayors – and judges and even people holding lesser positions that are nevertheless elective, such as sanitation commissioner, and yes, school board chairperson or member.

I remember when I lived on my Pennsylvania Railroad barge on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River in West New York seeing recall election signs stapled to trees and taped inside the front windows of houses all over the towns along the Palisades, like Union City, Hoboken, Jersey City, and North Bergen.  No sooner would those towns hold an election, that they were gathering signatures for a recall of whomever they elected to mayor, city council, it didn’t seem to matter.  My friend and West Point classmate David Vaught, who was my roommate on the barge, was from Southern Illinois and had been involved in local politics since he worked for his father and his father’s best friend, Pud Williams, canvassing neighborhoods and putting up lawn signs as a boy.  He had never seen anything like the mania for recall elections in New Jersey. 

It turned out that the recall frenz was a result of the area’s long history of one-party, Democratic, rule in the area.  It was difficult for different Democrats running for office to distinguish themselves from each other, so the guy who lost an election – they were all guys, natch – would declare himself a reformer and start a recall of the “old guard machine politics” winner.  A bodega owner in North Bergen we questioned about the whole recall thing patiently one afternoon explained that the guy behind a recent recall calling himself a reformer was part of the party “machine” last time he won.  They slung  reformer-machine epithets like they put on suits of clothes, he said.  It could get ugly in Hudson and Bergen Counties.  Squads of guys patrolled neighborhoods at night either tearing down campaign signs or trying to make sure they stayed up, and there were reports in the local newspapers about fistfights breaking out at Democratic Party meetings.

My favorite recall story appeared in the New York Times in the early 1980’s.  A Times editor had apparently been skiing at Belleayre ski area, located right next to the little Catskill town of Pine Hill, and noticed during his visits over the winter that there had been a mayoral election in November and not one but two recall elections since then.  He dispatched a reporter, whose name I wish I could remember, to find out what was up with all the recalls.

The Times reporter arrived in Pine Hill and began what turned out to be a rather fruitless inquiry into what was going on.  He conducted multiple interviews, including talking to the mayor who initially won, the guy who won the recall deposing him, and the woman – who turned out to be the ex-wife of the recall winner – who was gathering signatures for the next recall.  The reporter attempted to figure out what the issues were that were driving all the recall elections, but found none, other than internecine political warfare that appeared to be based on family grudges and long simmering hatreds over money that was spent to fix the potholes on one rural road and not the other.

Flummoxed, the reporter, driving out of Pine Hill and stopping for gas, decided he would take one last stab at trying to figure out what madness had seized the little Catskills town of Pine Hill.  Telling the gas station owner that he was a reporter assigned to do a story on all the recall elections, and he couldn’t figure out what was going on, he finally got his answer: 

“That’s what you get when you don’t have cable,” the guy told him, describing one of the major causes of the cabin fever that grips the Catskills every winter and the reaction to it.  He ran the answer as the last line in his story, which the Times featured on the front page, probably just so they could print that line.

There are other reasons for the number of impeachments in recent years, most of them having to do with the capture of one of our political parties by an increasingly large anti-democratic authoritarian faction of its elected members, but here’s another one.

That’s what you get when you do have cable.