The following podcast contains advertising.

To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast,

become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair.

That's patreon.com slash law fair.

Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings,

rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.

There is zero chance that the initiation of impeachment proceedings by the House of Representatives,

we'll lead to the Presidents removal from office prior to November of 2020.

I'll just be very flat. Zero. There is no Republican support whatsoever for such a move,

either at the rank and file level or at the level of elected public officials.

And so it would be a replay of the feckless attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office in 1998

with the added feature that Democrats will have proved that they learned nothing from what happened to the Republicans as a result of that.

I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast May 4, 2019.

Bill Galston, one of my dearest colleagues at the Brookings Institution,

General Wise Man and former Bill Clinton domestic policy adviser,

wrote his column this week in the Wall Street Journal, arguing against impeachment in a fashion that sharply diverges from arguments made by others on LawFair.

He argues that polling data shows that an impeachment inquiry would be an irresponsible direction for anyone hoping to remove Trump from office.

I invited him on the podcast to discuss his column as well as his recent book, Anti-Pleralism, the populist threat to liberal democracy.

We talked about populism as an international phenomenon and as a domestic one.

We talked about the role of economics and identity in driving populism internationally.

And we talked about whether populisms of the left and right were symmetric issues or whether they presented different ones.

It's the LawFair podcast episode 414, Bill Galston on populism and impeachment.

...