Criminalizing Routine Politics

With a couple of exceptions—Marc Ambinder and Jon Chait, most notably—political reporters and commentators have treated as credible GOP claims (first made by California Rep. Darrell Issa, and later picked up by the entire GOP membership of the Senate Judiciary Committee) that the Obama administration might have committed a criminal act by offering Joe Sestak (and, based on more recent news, Andrew Romanoff) jobs in the executive department. Issa even mused that the Sestak affair could be “Obama’s Watergate.”

By this definition of impeachable behavior, not only should Ronald Reagan have been impeached—for offering a job to the weak incumbent S.I. Hayakawa to discourage him from running from a second term—but LBJ also should have faced impeachment proceedings.

This clip is from a conversation between LBJ and future House Speaker Jim Wright, on the eve of the filing deadline in Texas’ 1964 Democratic primary. Much like Obama (and, indeed, like every President), LBJ, in his role as party leader, did what he could to clear primary challengers to incumbents. He thought he had done the deed in Texas: his chief aide, Walter Jenkins, had pressured Congressman Joe Kilgore out of a primary challenge to the liberal incumbent, Ralph Yarborough; and, in exchange, Texas labor leaders had promised LBJ that they wouldn’t finance a primary challenge to the conservative incumbent governor, John Connally, from the pro-labor politician who had almost beaten Connally two years before, Don Yarborough. (The two Yarboroughs weren’t related.)

Then, just hours before the deadline, the labor leaders double-crossed the President, and Don Yarborough filed papers to challenge Connally. Johnson, furious, phoned Wright to urge him to run for the Senate—making clear, repeatedly, that Wright would be taken care of with any position he wanted should he lose the primary. Under Issa’s new (and transparently absurd) conception of Watergate, this apparently counted for an impeachable offense. For anyone who knows anything about political history, this type of practice was unsurprising, and, indeed, an intrinsic part of politics.