Pelosi and co. on impeachment: Not if, when?

In some ways, the press conference held by Pelosi, Cummings, Nadler and Schiff in the wake of Mueller's testimony today was exquisitely frustrating. Their dual message made no sense on its face: the president manifestly deserves impeachment but we need more evidence. Nadler said the president committed crimes. Pelosi also said that "crimes were committed against our Constitution," albeit in passive voice. Schiff said Trump was disloyal to the country, citing his negotiating the Moscow Trump Tower deal while seeking the presidency without telling the public. So how can they not open an impeachment inquiry?

At the same time, it seemed to me that these committee chairs and Pelosi in particular may have turned a corner. This was the first time I've heard Pelosi speak about impeachment without actively undercutting it. They were stalling, but they were implicitly promising to get there.

This promise -- too strong a word -- was almost explicit at the end. Schiff, all but acknowledging that the Senate would not convict, also declared that that was not the point. My emphasis (and rough transcript) below:

Too big to jail? Can the U.S. prosecute an ex-President?

Should democratically elected leaders be tried for war crimes if there's reasonable cause to believe they may have committed them?

Michael Walzer of Princeton surveys 350 years of killing kings (and hanging Nazis) and concludes: almost certainly not. Reviewing the conditions under which past regimes have put their predecessors or war opponents on trial and executed them, he notes that all constitute radical rejection of the deposed or defeated enemy -- i.e., that trials occur after regime change (obviously enough -- in a way, Walzer seems to see his mission as laying bare what should be obvious). Democracies,Walzer argues, are different -- and the consequences of treating the policy decisions of predecessors as criminal are dangerous.

Walzer issues a warning that should be brooded on seriously. But he draws conclusions that even he is uncomfortable with, and that in my view should be repudiated.

Here is the warning:

we should think very carefully before we do anything that raises the stakes of democratic politics—and putting your opponents on trial after they lose an election would certainly raise the stakes. There is a narrowly prudential argument against doing that (in addition to the broader prudential argument that I have been making): if we raise the stakes for them, they can raise the stakes for us. Paraphrasing Saint-Just, we might say that nobody can rule innocently: there will always be reasons for a trial. There will always be political maneuvers or policy decisions that violate the law or that can be made to look as if they violate the law. And once the game gets serious in that way, anyone holding office would have a very strong incentive to do whatever was necessary to win the next election. Winning some and losing some would then look like a fool’s politics. It would be very dangerous, I think, to start down this path.