Hey republic-not-a-democracy folks: It's your time to shine. By Seth Masket.

Hey republic-not-a-democracy folks: It's your time to shine

 

Mischiefs of Faction

Oct. 4.

By Seth Masket

If you’ve been spilling ink over the past months or years arguing that the United States of America is a republic, not a democracy, congratulations, this is your moment. 

I can’t really improve on what Ed Burmilla, Jamelle Bouie, Jonathan Bernstein, Chris Baylor, or others have said on this topic. My own impression is that this republic/democracy distinction doesn’t really mean very much, and the argument is typically just used as a cudgel to defend anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, or to just say that the people can’t have what they say they want.

But, to the extent “republic” has some actual distinct meaning in modern American politics, it would seem to be something like this: Elections are important but they're not everything. We have political values in this nation -- limited government, checks and balances, national sovereignty, the rule of law, and so forth -- and venerable institutions designed to protect those. Just because you won a recent election does not grant you immunity from the law or exemption from those values.

Indeed, the whole idea of an unchecked executive is really antithetical to republican government. “A republic not a democracy” folks like to bring up examples from Rome. So, okay, Rome stopped being a republic and started being an empire when its Senate handed over power to unelected Caesars who served for life and hand-picked their heirs. 

Well, we are now at such a critical moment. By publicly and privately inviting and pressuring foreign governments to intervene in American elections to his advantage, by calling for his congressional critics to be arrested and tried for treason, and by vowing insurrection and civil unrest should his rule be challenged, the President is flouting the law, republican values, and his oath of office. His claim that he has an absolute right to do these things because he won the last election is entirely inconsistent with the Constitution while entirely consistent with the behavior of dictators and tyrants.

Despite the complaints of some of Trump’s defenders, an impeachment would not be an attempt to undo or nullify the election of 2016. No serious person disputes that election’s outcome. Impeachment is a check on the executive, based on the Founders' non-crazy concern that voters (or Electors) could get it wrong, or that even if they picked well, a president could still act in a way hostile to the nation or its values. Indeed, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, and others agreed on including an impeachment clause precisely because they were concerned about presidents becoming the pawns of hostile foreign leaders.

Following a procedure delineated in the Constitution is not a coup, and it certainly isn’t a constitutional crisis. Impeachment and removal from office has a very high bar, but if it wasn’t intended for this particular moment, it’s hard to see what it was intended for.

As Bernstein has noted, the various defenses of Trump have basically evaporated -- he knew what he was doing, he’s done everything overtly, he was directly involved in all these decisions, etc. Jeffrey Toobin summed it up well on CNN yesterday: the question is no longer whether the President has committed these profound violations; the question is whether there will be a price for committing them.

So this is the small-r republican moment. If you’ve been making the “republic not a democracy” argument and believe that American political institutions and values matter, that Congress can actually check or remove a dangerous president even if he was legitimately elected, that the oath of office and national sovereignty and the rule of law have meaning, now’s the time to speak out and be heard.

Unless you didn’t mean that.

Volker Not A Good Guy After All Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Volker Not A Good Guy After All

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 20min

We have another rush of news tonight. President Trump allegedly raised Biden and Warren in a call with Chinese President Xi in June. Chinese government officials have reportedly been reaching out to Trump associates today to get clarification on whether the President is serious about wanting the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden. (Thumbs ups seem to have been the response.) Critically, though not terribly surprisingly, the Journal is now reporting that President Trump ordered the firing of Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch because Rudy Giuliani told him that she was an obstacle to plans to force the government of Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 election. But the biggest news, or at least the most surprising, is about Kurt Volker, the special envoy for Ukraine who resigned last week and testified today in a closed door session on Capitol Hill.

The versions of events I had heard suggested that Volker wasn’t a prime actor in any of this, more trying to help the US and Ukraine navigate the shenanigans of Rudy Giuliani, who of course has and had the ear of the President. For instance, we know that Volker helped arrange a meeting in Madrid between Giuliani and Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky. But what I had heard is that the Zelensky team got spooked after Giuliani appeared to turn against them a few months ago and told reporters they were anti-Trump. The Ukrainians asked Volker, the US envoy, to put them in touch with Giuliani so they could meet and smooth the waters. That wouldn’t be great for Volker. But one could certainly argue it was making the best of a bad situation not of his creation. At least that is what I’d understood.

New information from the Times presents a much darker picture.

The Times reports that in the “weeks after” the July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky, Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland (the Ambassador to NATO discussed in this postthis afternoon) drafted a statement which President Zelensky was supposed to release committing his government to investigating Burisma Holdings, the gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat, and collusion between Ukraine and the Democratic party in 2016. Both an unnamed top aide to Zelensky and Rudy Giuliani were aware of the statement being written for Zelensky, though they apparently did not directly participate in writing it. The Times is unclear on whether the statement was ever delivered to Zelensky. Regardless, he never released it.

The last two grafs of the piece contain what amounts to Volker’s and Sondland apologia for the memo.

The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker believed that Mr. Giuliani was “poisoning” Mr. Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Mr. Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Mr. Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.

Mr. Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.

The idea here is that this would end Ukraine’s practice of not following through on verbal commitments and secure Trump’s support for Ukraine. That seems sort of plausible as far as it goes. But that’s only another way of saying they’d solve the problem by finalizing and effectuating Trump’s gross abuse of power. It’s hardly a justification.

It should also be noted that the President of Ukraine publicly announcing his intent to investigate Burisma and 2016 collusion by Ukraine on behalf of the Clinton campaign would probably have been all the Trump campaign and the White House really ever wanted. This has never been about investigations. It’s about validating conspiracy theories for consumption in US domestic politics. That would have been quite a lot of validating.

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Nope. That Doesn’t Sound Good Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Nope. That Doesn’t Sound Good

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 4h

There’s some new factual information in a piecethat just ran on the Fox News website. I know, I know. But these are real new facts. What’s interesting is that it is not entirely clear to me whether whoever leaked the encrypted text messages thought they were exonerating.

In any case, here we go …

You can read the whole piece here. But the portion I’m excerpting comes in the midst of a report on Ambassador Kurt Volker’s closed door testimony today on Capitol Hill. Volker was the special envoy for Ukraine, sort of the roving troubleshooter for the larger Ukraine crisis/issue, not the Ambassador to the country.

Meanwhile, new encrypted text messages obtained by Fox News show Volker and other U.S. officials battling internally last month over whether Trump was engaged in a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine as he pressed for the country to look into the Biden family, while holding back U.S. aid. The texts with Volker, U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine Bill Taylor indicate that the nature of a potential arrangement between the U.S. and Ukraine was a matter of dispute.

“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor said in a text exchange.

Sondland responded by saying that was not what was happening. “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”

Both men then agreed to cease discussing the matter over text, noting that phone calls with the appropriate officials would be preferable.

As I interpret the piece, the point of these text messages is supposed to be that even among themselves it wasn’t clear that Trump was operating from bad motives. There was a difference of opinion even amongst these central players. If that is the thrust, that is, let’s say, a very generous thrust. (As I note below in a Late Update, this thrust seems to be Fox’s, not the source’s, based on a subsequent report from ABC News.)

Taylor is a career foreign service officer. He is actually a former full Ambassador to Ukraine. Now he’s Chargé d’Affaires. Sondland is a politically-wired hotel and private equity magnate who President Trump made Ambassador to the EU. We should be clear: appointing political power players and donors to ambassadorships is an established part of the US political system, for better or worse. It did not start with Trump. But Sondland is a political guy and at least to a significant extent a Trump guy. (He was in fact an early Trump supporterduring the 2016 campaign.) So his comments and Taylor’s come with very different contexts.

Taylor appeared to treat it as a given that the White House was holding up military aide to Ukraine to force a quid pro quo of military in exchange for 2020 campaign assistance. This isn’t a transcript. It’s text messages. So the words are as clear and complete to us as they would have been to the people on the text chain. We don’t need to wonder about intonation and nuance. It’s just text. What it certainly sounds like is Taylor says this just isn’t right. Sondland replies with a sort of starchy recitation that he’s wrong, that everyone agrees there’s no quid pro quo and that President Trump is just focused on Ukraine’s problem with endemic corruption. Quite notably, he then appears to say, hey, let’s not discuss this any more on text.

A fair reading of this exchange – and we clearly don’t have the whole exchange – is that everyone knew what was happening but there was some agreement or desire, at least among the President’s supporters not to say out loud what everyone knew.

Or at least, not to say it in texts which are retained for posterity.

Late Update: ABCNews has now run their own version of the story. And it answers a few of the questions I posed above. According to ABC, Volker shared the text messages as part of his closed door testimony. As for not texting anymore, after the disagreement about a quid pro quo, Sondland writes: “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” So my revised take on this would be that Volker knew what he was doing when he shared this information and Fox put a generous gloss on it. Meanwhile, the let’s not text about this anymore coda speaks for itself.

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The Biggest Question is ‘Why?’ Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Biggest Question is ‘Why?’

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

We are seeing what started as a whistleblower complaint about pressure on Ukraine expand into something much larger. President Trump was trying to coerce Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 election or lose critically needed military aide in its slow motion battle with Russia. Now we see that Attorney General Bill Barr has been making the rounds of the world pressuring allied governments to embrace conspiracy theories about bad actors in the US government plotting against President Trump. They are also pursuing theories that Russia was framed for the 2016 interference campaign. A basic question gets lost in the onrush of revelations: why?

With Ukraine, one part is clear enough. President Trump wants to be reelected. At least to date he’s seen Joe Biden as the biggest threat. So he’s corruptly using his power as President to force a foreign government to attack Biden. It’s a hideous abuse of power but the practical logic is straightforward. But why the effort to investigate the “origins of the Russia investigations”?

The usual answer is vindication, payback. The scandal haunted Trump’s presidency for two years, defied his control, battered his popularity. He’s angry and wants revenge against the people who started it. He wants to prove that he didn’t just beat the rap but was in fact set up. He is the aggrieved party, the victim.

But this doesn’t quite add up. Mueller didn’t exonerate Trump of collusion. But for Trump’s purposes, close enough: insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. Trump has shown that is more than enough for him to claim exoneration and vindication. At the end of the day, it’s done. Mueller closed shop. There are no indictments of the President or his family. Even the indictments of his associates have not touched specifically on a conspiracy with Russia or directly implicated Donald Trump.

At the same time, a pliant Justice Department Inspector General has produced friendly reports, lined up former FBI #2 Andy McCabe for prosecution, issued an excoriating report against James Comey, who Trump fired. Trump’s got yet another long-awaited FISA report coming. If Trump wants vindication and payback he’s managed a fair amount of each. But here we have him angling the entirety of his government – the State Department, Department of Justice, the White House – toward the end of trying to prove that the Mueller probe itself was a conspiracy against him.

This gets lost in the mix. People talk about the ‘origins’ of the probe. But when Mueller took over the investigations he inherited most of the original investigators. He also had to dig deep into how the probe began – Papadapoulos, Mifsud, Carter Page, Manafort, all of it. If it was a plot against Trump, Mueller and his investigation are clearly part of it because they have literally investigated the origins of the probe themselves. If there was a problem they would have found it. He is not only focused on proving wrongdoing by Americans but exonerating Russia.

This seems to be the theory behind Bill Barr’s recent trip to Italy – the claim that Joseph Mifsud, the presumed Russian intelligence asset who befriended George Papadopoulos, was actually a western intelligence operative sent in to set up candidate Trump.

This is even more clear in Trump’s references to “Crowdstrike” and the missing server in his calls with President Zelensky. As Matt Shuham and Josh Kovensky explain here, this is a reference to what is usually called the “Seth Rich conspiracy theory.” This one holds that Russia never hacked the DNC. It was an inside job, a disgruntled DNC employee who wanted to expose Democratic wrongdoing. That was Seth Rich, who was later murdered by the Clintons or others associated with the Democrats. (Seth Rich was actually killed in a random street crime. This conspiracy theory, pushed on the right and in Russian propaganda channels for years, has stalked his grieving family for three years.) Crowdstrike was brought in, in this theory, to frame Russia for the hack and then sell that false claim to the FBI.

This is quite a rabbit hole to go down. But the central premise and aim is key: President Trump is trying not only to prove his innocence and victimization. He’s trying to prove that the Russian interference campaign never happened, that Russia was framed too.

One can easily speculate various nefarious reasons why this would be his focus. The most ‘innocent’ explanation I can see is that he and his entourage got focused on exonerating Paul Manafort as the prelude to a pardon. Manafort appears to have looped Giuliani and Co in with all his old Ukrainian contacts and business partners. That channeled all those cover stories and diversions through Giuliani to Trump. Needless to say, the focus on exonerating and pardoning Paul Manafort raises no fewer questions than the need to exonerate Russia.

What it all comes down to is this. Most of us seem to get that the President’s actions have been gravely wrong and merit removal from office. The rush of revelations have been so rapid, though, that we’re not quite zeroing in on what he’s trying to accomplish with this wrongdoing. The, why?

All of this seems focused on pushing (and getting backers for) the idea that US intelligence agencies and the Mueller office were plotting agains the President and that Russia was framed for interfering in the 2016 election. And the storylines and theories are mostly or all ones that first surfaced in Russian propaganda outlets. Again, why? Just feeling wrongly accused or trying to exonerate himself simply isn’t a sufficient explanation.

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Trump threatened ‘civil war.’ He’s cornered — and panicking about it. By Greg Sargent

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Trump threatened ‘civil war.’ He’s cornered — and panicking about it.

Greg Sargent

 

September 30, 2019 at 11:12 p.m. 

 

6-8 minutes

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President Trump has now approvingly quoted a top supporter raising the prospect of “civil war." He accused unnamed national security officials in his own government of “spying” on him. He just called for a top Democrat in Congress to be arrested for “treason.”
And that was all in the last 24 hours.

All of this has many observers warning that Trump is lurching in an increasingly authoritarian direction, as the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry ratchets up.
But all of this is better seen as an expression of deep panic and self-incrimination — not just because the latest revelations have Trump on the defensive but also because of a meaningful shift in the power dynamics shaping the standoff between the White House and Democrats.
There has been a very fundamental change in the way House Democrats are going about holding Trump accountable: They’re no longer in the position of demanding cooperation from the White House and then waiting for a court to compel it.
Instead, Democrats now can threaten immediate consequences for the failure to comply: impeachment for that very act of stonewalling.
This pattern, and the force of this new dynamic, becomes clear when you pull together multiple new statements from Democrats. On ABC News, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that if the White House doesn’t meet its demands as part of their impeachment inquiry, “they will be strengthening the case for an article of impeachment based on obstruction of the lawful functions of Congress.”
Schiff issued a similar warning on NBC News. And Democrats on three committees just subpoenaed the State Department for a raft of documents designed to shed more light on Trump’s pressure on the Ukrainian president. They added the pointed warning that failure to comply “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.”
This came with a hard deadline of one week. And this fundamentally upends the dynamic that held sway for months.
Before, Trumpworld had developed an effective way to insulate Trump against accountability. White House lawyers employed deeply strained claims of executive prerogative to stall testimony and document production demanded by Democrats hoping to flesh out the special counsel’s findings. Meanwhile, Trumpists such as Corey Lewandowski unleashed a fusillade of absurd dissembling when questioned by Congress.
Trumpworld could keep all this up, secure in the knowledge that the right-wing media would lay down a covering fog of pro-Trump obfuscation while mainstream fact-checks got drowned out by the din, and by their own both-sidesing instincts.
As long as Republicans in Congress could be counted on never to break from Trump, and the courts would drag out Democratic oversight demands for many months, there would be no immediate consequences for any of this, and perhaps not ever.
But now that has changed. Now there is a consequence for all of this.

A stark choice
The result is that those in Trumpworld are faced with a stark choice: Either they cooperate with Democratic demands, or they make an article of impeachment for obstructing Congress more likely.
The problem for them is that such cooperation will also likely build the case for impeachment. Democrats have subpoenaed the State Department for a full transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. They’ve demanded records relating to Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign to pressure Ukraine, and to Trump’s decision to withhold military aid.
Meanwhile, Schiff has already demanded that the Justice Department produce records that could shed light on its role in trying to block the whistleblower complaint from reaching Congress.
Meeting such demands would almost certainly deepen the gravity of this scandal. After all, the known facts are impeachable: Trump corruptly used the power of the presidency to pressure a foreign leader desperately awaiting our military aid to interfere in a U.S. election on his behalf by manufacturing smears against a likely general-election opponent. And his top officials tried to keep it all from Congress.
But if Trump and officials refuse to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, they are preventing Congress from getting to the bottom of all this already-established corruption.
An article of impeachment for that is not an idle threat. That formed part of one article against Richard Nixon.
Now that we’re seeing polls showing majority support for the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, further obstruction of Congress is likely to work against Trump in another way — by helping to build public support for impeachment itself.
Trump builds case for his impeachment
Which brings us to Trump’s latest rage-tweets. Trump suggested Schiff should be tried for “treason” and quoted a prominent supporter claiming removal would “cause a Civil War like fracture." Trump also recently intimated that the whistleblower should be executed.
It has been suggested that these utterances themselves constitute more grounds for impeachment. But this point needs to be refined.
Such outbursts, rather than constituting impeachable offenses on their own, could form a part of an article of impeachment for obstructing Congress. This would declare that Trump has defied lawful oversight efforts. It would add that pursuant to that, Trump tried to incite violence in the country, potentially put the whistleblower’s life in danger, tried to chill future whistleblowing and suggested prosecution of a member of Congress for carrying out those efforts.
There is precedent for such an approach. One article against Nixon included his pattern of public statements — his relentless public lying about ongoing investigations into him — but this was used to support the broader charge of obstruction of justice. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz detail in their excellent book on impeachment, this “mosaic approach” is the way to loop in lesser but egregious charges.
Thus, Trump’s wannabe-autocrat ravings actually could help bolster an article of impeachment against him. And they could help build the public case for his impeachment as well.

A guide to the GOP’s increasingly pathetic defenses of Trump by Paul Waldman

Opinion | A guide to the GOP’s increasingly pathetic defenses of Trump

By Paul Waldman

 

Oct. 1, 2019 at 1:36 a.m.  

6-8 minutes

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After a week of stunning revelations and momentous developments, including the beginning of an impeachment inquiry, President Trump’s underlings and allies fanned out to television studios over the weekend to offer the best defense they could muster, to explain to the American public why all of Trump’s actions were beyond reproach and the inquiry is unnecessary and illegitimate.

In case you missed this desperate, bizarre and at times pathetic collective performance, here’s a guide to what Republicans are saying in order to defend the president.
“Trump was pressing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden because he cares so deeply about fighting corruption.” Faced with a rough transcript provided by the White House in which President Trump explicitly asks the president of Ukraine to investigate a potential 2020 opponent, Republicans have argued that Trump’s interest was not in Biden per se, but in the issue of corruption more broadly. Because if there’s anything Trump hates, it’s corruption. Right?
So Trump’s conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky was described this way on “Meet the Press” by Rep. Steve Scalise: “He and President Trump are talking about that in the conversation, things that both of them are doing to clean up corruption and drain the swamp.”
An international anti-corruption effort! So inspiring.
Yet Republicans have been unable to answer why, if Trump was legitimately working to stamp out corruption in Ukraine, he would send his personal lawyer to do the job and not, say, the State Department.
When asked that question, Scalise said: “Well, you’d have to ask Rudy Giuliani." When top White House adviser Stephen Miller was pressed repeatedly on this by “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, Miller did a heroic job of dodging.
“Can I interest you in a plateful of lies?” Republicans, including Trump, have insisted that the real story is that when he was vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company on whose board his son Hunter sat. The problem is that this is simply false. The prosecutor in question was viewed by pretty much the whole world as irredeemably corrupt, and he wasn’t investigating that company.
Nevertheless, Republicans obviously think that if they repeat this endlessly, it will create enough confusion to make people conclude that everyone’s corrupt. You can watch this absolute nightmare of an interview that CNN’s Jake Tapper did with Rep. Jim Jordan to see how they go about it.
“It’s all hearsay.” This is perhaps the strangest defense of Trump: Because the whistleblower did not personally hear the call between Trump and Zelensky but was told about it by multiple White House officials, it’s just hearsay and therefore need not be taken seriously.
“It’s all hearsay," said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “The whistleblower didn’t hear the phone call.”
The problem is that the whistleblower’s description of the call is backed up by the rough transcript the White House itself released. We have it in Trump’s own incredibly damning words.
“Here’s a made-up conspiracy theory about the whistleblower law that I got from the Internet.” This weekend, Republicans suddenly began alleging that they had discovered a new conspiracy, that the law covering whistleblowers was changed in August to allow hearsay evidence when such evidence hadn’t been allowed before, presumably so this whistleblower’s complaint could be filed.
As Kevin Poulsen of the Daily Beast explains, the theory began in the right-wing publication the Federalist, which misinterpreted a change in the check boxes on the form for filing whistleblower complaints as a secret and nefarious change in policy. In fact, there was no change in policy and as far as we can tell there has never been a requirement that whistleblowers report only firsthand information.
But for Republicans it was apparently too good to check. The lie was repeated by Jordan, Sean Hannity, Giuliani, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Graham. Trump himself repeated the lie in a tweet.
It would be stupid enough even were it not for the fact that at this point it’s completely irrelevant, since, to repeat, the allegations in the whistleblower complaint have been corroborated by the rough transcript that the White House itself released.
“It’s a conspiracy.” Republicans are setting off multiple smoke bombs of lunacy to blind everyone to what actually happened. Some of those theories go back to 2016, while others concern the whistleblower.
“I know the difference between a whistleblower and a deep-state operative,” said White House aide Stephen Miller on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is a deep-state operative, pure and simple.”
In one TV appearance, Giuliani somehow managed to bring in the FBI, Hillary Clinton and George Soros in a stream-of-consciousness riff about the forces working against Trump, a diatribe so incoherent that I won’t bother repeating it here.
There are other, even dumber arguments, like the idea that the investigation is illegitimate because Democrats hate Trump, or that Trump’s obvious quid pro quo was not a quid pro quo, I guess because he didn’t say the words “quid pro quo." As McCarthy said, “When I read the transcript, I see two leaders having admiration, not intimidation.”
One can’t help but ask: Is that really all they’ve got?
The answer is: Yes, that really is all they’ve got. When you have a president who is so spectacularly brazen about his corruption, justifying his actions requires logical and moral gymnastics far beyond the capabilities of anyone with a shred of dignity or integrity. So all Trump asks of them is that they be utterly shameless. They’ve got that covered.

Opinion | Even if the Senate won’t convict, impeachment will still punish and deter. By Max Boot

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Even if the Senate won’t convict, impeachment will still punish and deter

September 30, 2019 at 10:26 p.m. GMT+9


By Max Boot

 

6-7 minutes

---

There are good and bad arguments against impeachment. I don’t find either compelling, and I’d like to explain why.
The bad arguments, cynically spread by President Trump and his toadies, go to the substance of the allegations against him. Faced with damning evidence that, as the whistleblower put it, “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” his disingenuous defenders toss out one lame alibi after another.

Trump didn’t break any laws. Actually, it’s a crime for an American candidate to solicit or accept “any contribution” from a foreign national. But you don’t have to break the law to be impeached.
There was no quid pro quo. Wrong. There was. Right after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his desire to buy U.S. munitions, Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” He then went on to ask Ukraine for its help, first, to clear him of charges of collusion with Russia and, then (“the other thing”), to “find out about” Joe Biden. This demand was buttressed by Trump’s stoppage, at least a week before the call, of nearly $400 million in U.S. aid.
The president is allowed to ask for foreign help with a corruption investigation. True, but there is no investigation of Biden — and if there were, it would be conducted by the FBI, not the president’s personal lawyer. The reason there’s no investigation is that Biden did nothing wrong in pressing Ukraine to get rid of a corrupt prosecutor — who was not, contrary to Trump’s lies, probing the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Trump was asking for the Ukrainians to start an investigation to help him politically.
All presidents politicize foreign policy. True, to varying degrees, but no president has ever so blatantly asked for foreign interference to help him win. The closest parallel is Richard Nixon’s secret efforts in 1968 to encourage Saigon to sabotage peace talks with North Vietnam — but Nixon wasn’t yet president and those sordid machinations weren’t documented till years later.
The whistleblower relies on hearsay — just like the Steele dossier. The difference is that the whistleblower’s account — of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and the secret computer system used to store transcripts of Trump’s most egregious conversations with foreign leaders — has checked out. The rest of his allegations can be corroborated by subpoenaing his colleagues.
All of these claims are, as Chris Wallace of Fox News says, “deeply misleading.” The more serious concerns are raised by those — including my Post colleague George F. Will and the New York Times’s David Brooks — who agree that Trump did something terribly wrong but who nevertheless argue against impeachment as the remedy. Why impeach, they ask, when the Republican-controlled Senate won’t convict? The whole process, they warn, will put the country through agony and could backfire, potentially helping Trump to get reelected. What’s the point with an election 13 months away?
True, impeachment is a political gamble. It could help the party pushing impeachment (as the proceedings against Richard Nixon greatly did) or hurt it (as the proceedings against Bill Clinton slightly did). The problem is, Democrats have no choice. They can hardly wait for an election to oust Trump when the president is trying to rig the vote.
Even assuming the Senate doesn’t convict, impeachment in the House will accomplish what prosecutions are supposed to — it will punish and deter misconduct. It’s silly to argue that Trump actually wants to be impeached; his fury at the very prospect — and his willingness to release the rough transcript and the whistleblower’s complaint after stonewalling so many other requests — belie that notion. (Check out his Twitter freak-out against the “savages” on his trail.)
Trump has no desire to go down in history as only the third president in 230 years to be impeached. This will leave an indelible stain on his presidency that no amount of spin can wash off. Impeachment will be in the first paragraph of his obituary, just as it is now in the first paragraph of Bill Clinton’s Encyclopaedia Britannica entry.
No future president will want to be impeached, either. Thus, impeachment will lay down a marker for posterity: If a president solicits foreign help for his campaign, he will face severe retribution. Not to impeach Trump for such conduct will encourage more of it in the future. By the same reasoning, it is imperative for the articles of impeachment to include a few of Trump’s other, well-documented offenses — especially obstruction of justice and obstruction of Congress — to send an unmistakable message to future officeholders that such conduct will not be tolerated, either.
This is one time when Congress must put aside political calculations — which are often off the mark anyway — and just do the right thing. Whatever voters think, history will vindicate those who (like Sens. Margaret Chase Smith during the McCarthy era and Sam Ervin during Watergate) stand up to blatant abuses of authority.