Posts published in January 2020

Trump’s Actions Vis-à-Vis Ukraine Were Inherently Wrong Irrespective of His Obviously Bad Motives

Trump’s Actions Vis-à-Vis Ukraine Were Inherently Wrong Irrespective of His Obviously Bad Motives

By John R Guardiano on January 30, 2020

There have been a lot of smoke and mirrors offered up in defense of Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Ukraine; but one of the weakest defenses is the notion that we have to ascertain Trump’s motives to know whether he did wrong, and that ascertaining those motives is challenging, complicated, and difficult.

The issue of motives arose during the Senate impeachment trial Wednesday when Sen. Collins (R-Maine) asked a question on behalf of herself and Senators Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Romney (R-Utah). The Senators wanted to know how they should consider Trump’s actions if he had more than one motive—rooting out corruption, say, as well as personal political gain.

On the most fundamental level, of course, the question of motives is utterly irrelevant. What matters, after all, is what the president did, not what motivated him to do what he did.

If, for example, you steal a car, embezzle money, rape a woman, or murder someone, does it matter what motivated you? Isn’t what matters that you committed a heinous and illegal act irrespective of your motive? We punish people for crimes and misdeeds, not because they have bad motives or thoughts.

Indeed, as Renato Mariotti observes in Politico:

“At trial, the motive behind a defendant’s commission of a crime usually doesn’t matter. Even if a public official took bribes in order to pay his medical bills, he is still guilty of bribery. If a fraudster ripped off billionaires and gave the money to charity, she is nonetheless guilty of fraud.”

Exactly. So, even assuming that we can’t know what motivated Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Ukraine, we do know what he did: He withheld Congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine while asking the government there to do him a “favor”: investigate Joe Biden and Burisma.

Thus he solicited a personal political favor from a foreign government; he asked that government to interfere in our presidential election by “investigating” his top political rival; and he implied or suggested to that government that their Congressionally authorized aid might be withheld if they were less than forthcoming and helpful to him on this matter.

All of this is wrong and arguably impeachable. Case closed.

Now, whether Trump should be convicted and removed from office for this offense is an altogether different question; but his underlying actions are clearly and obviously wrong. At the very least, Trump should be formally censured by Congress, not simply acquitted, or, as his apologists will no doubt wrongly describe any acquittal, “exonerated.”

Yet, the Wall Street Journal today devotes a brief editorial to regurgitating this irrelevant and disingenuous defense of Trump.

“House managers,” says the Journal,

“concede that President Trump broke no laws with any specific actions. Instead, they claim that he abused his power because his motives for asking Ukraine’s President to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden were self-interested—to assist his re-election rather than as Mr. Trump claims to investigate corruption.”

First, it has been well-established that a president need not break the law to be impeached. Jonah Goldberg explains why in an excellent piece in The Dispatch. But more to the point, as I’ve just explained, we don’t need to know what motivated Trump to know that what he did was clearly and obviously wrong.

No American president should ever ask a foreign government to investigate his top political rival; and no American president should try and use Congressionally authorized aid as leverage to secure such an investigation.

Motives. That said, it doesn’t require any great powers of discernment or clairvoyance to know what motivated Trump, and it surely wasn’t a zeal to root out corruption in Ukraine.

Trump, after all, had never before expressed even a slight interest in the topic; and, during his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the word corruption never once left his lips. Moreover, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen has observed,

“Trump showed little interest in fighting corruption before Biden launched his campaign, and official government records suggest Trump was motivated by politics…

“Trump’s effort to end foreign corruption is only focused on one family: the Bidens. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney pointed out that this is no coincidence, noting that ‘it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated.’”

Additionally, there have been no corresponding anti-corruption policy initiatives or funding pushed by Trump and his administration. Yet, such initiatives, if they existed, would obviously lend credence to the notion that Trump was interested in fighting corruption.

To the contrary, as Cohen notes, Trump’s State Department is trying to reduce funding for federal anti-corruption efforts.

And of course, now there is the unpublished book manuscript by former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, which reportedly confirms Trump “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens…”

In short, we know what Trump did and we know why he did it, and we know that he did wrong. What we don’t know is why his apologists continue to spin and make excuses for his obvious misconduct.

Feature photo credit: The Hill.

The House Impeached Trump Fairly and Legitimately. The Senate is Acquitting Him Unfairly and Illegitimately.

The House Impeached Trump Fairly and Legitimately. The Senate is Acquitting Him Unfairly and Illegitimately.

By John R Guardiano on January 29, 2020

Is President Trump being impeached and tried fairly or unfairly? To Trump and his apologists, the answer is obvious: He is being treated unfairly and denied basic due process.

His attorneys complain, for instance, that Trump’s been denied the right to call and cross-examine witnesses. Trump, likewise, took to Twitter today to complain that “the Democrats already [have] had 17 witnesses, [while] we were given NONE!”

But this is disingenuous. Aside from Hunter Biden, who has absolutely nothing to do with this impeachment inquiry and thus is a diversion, it is not at all clear who the alleged missing Trump witnesses are.

Trump himself, moreover, invoked executive privilege to prevent both his current Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, and his former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, from participating in the House impeachment inquiry.

More to the point, analogies to a conventional criminal trial are inapt and inappropriate. By deliberate Constitutional design, impeachment is a political process.

This doesn’t mean that basic standards of fairness and due process don’t apply. However, it does mean that all of the legal niceties and procedural safeguards that apply in a conventional criminal trial do not apply in an impeachment hearing.

Conventional criminal trials were designed, first and foremost, to protect the innocent. Impeachment hearings, by contrast, are designed to protect the integrity of our laws and institutions, and the safety and security of our country above all else.

Thus we require guilt “beyond the shadow of a doubt” for criminal defendants. American presidents, however, enjoy no such presumption. Their guilt or innocence is secondary to the well-being of the country and our government.

The Political Clock. There’s also the matter of time and the political clock. American presidents are elected to a four-year term. Our Founding Fathers recognized that, because of a president’s limited time in office, impeachment hearings must be conducted expeditiously and not allowed to drag on interminably as many criminal trials do. Otherwise, impeachment could be rendered moot.

For these reasons, legal protections accorded to criminal defendants are simply not accorded to American presidents. The Founders believed that political checks and balances and the separation of powers would ensure that any impeachment hearing would basically be fair, or at least result in a just and equitable outcome.

And so it has been. The House of Representatives laid out a legitimate and fair process of inquiry and impeachment. Trump and his attorneys chose not to participate in this process. Instead, they have attacked and undermined that process every step of the way: by lambasting it as illegitimate from the start.

That is certainly their prerogative; but let’s not pretend that theirs is an honest, good-faith complaint, because it’s obviously not. What it is is political posturing and gamesmanship designed to obstruct Congressional oversight and deny Congress its Constitutionally prescribed power of impeachment.

A similar dynamic has played out regarding Trump’s use of executive privilege as an excuse or rationale for withholding documents from Congress and preventing his officials, past and present, from testifying there.

Law professors Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley complain that the House of Representatives should have taken this matter to the courts and let them decide whether Trump’s use of executive privilege is legitimate or illegitimate. But that would have taken many months and years, potentially, at which point the matter would have been rendered moot by the political clock and the 2020 election.

The House recognized that Trump was not acting in good faith, and instead, was stonewalling. Accordingly, then, they charged him with obstruction of Congress, which is the second article of impeachment. The first article of impeachment is abuse of power.

The House then delivered its articles of impeachment to the Senate, in the hopes that the Senate would compel witnesses and documents Trump denied to the House.

That was a smart, fair-minded and legitimate move. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans are uninterested in a fair impeachment trial. For crass political reasons, they want simply to go through the motions and summarily acquit Trump.

They act as his political Praetorian Guard, not as members of an independent branch of government charged with checking the executive’s abuse of power.

The truth is that Trump is clearly and plainly guilty as charged. He abused his authority as president to try and secure personal political favors from a foreign government, and he tried to use Congressionally authorized aid to that government as leverage to secure these favors.

And, because he’s plainly and obviously guilty, Trump and his attorneys refuse to contest the basic facts of the case, or even to participate in that case in any real and substantive way.

Instead, they complain about process. In so doing, they bring to mind that old law school admonition to aspiring trial attorneys: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

Trump and his attorneys have spent all of impeachment and the months leading up to it yelling like hell. But anyone even vaguely familiar with the case knows that they’re yelling loudly because the facts and the law are against them.

And what’s really unfair is not the House impeachment, but the Senate trial designed to conceal the truth from the American people while acquitting a president obviously guilty of wrongdoing.

Feature photo credit: Jon Elswick/Associated Press via the Boston Globe.

Media Coverage of the Supreme Court’s Public Charge Decision Sows Confusion Over the Role of the Judiciary

Media Coverage of the Supreme Court’s Public Charge Decision Sows Confusion Over the Role of the Judiciary

By John R Guardiano on January 28, 2020

The gnashing of teeth over the Supreme Court’s decision Monday to allow the Trump administration to “begin enforcing new limits on immigrants who are considered likely to become overly dependent on government benefit programs” shows that there is widespread confusion over the role of the judiciary.

The courts were never intended to be a super legislature where disputants who lose out in the political process can appeal for a rematch and ultimate victory. Public policy is supposed to be determined by the legislative branch of government and, to the extent that the Constitution and legislature allow it, the executive branch as well.

The judiciary simply has no role in formulating public policy, or at least is should not have such a role in the American system of government. “We the people” through our elected representatives, not nine unelected lawyers ensconced in Washington, D.C., are responsible for setting public policy.

Yet, media coverage has focused on the public policy implications of the Court’s ruling, with fulsome quotes from various left-wing interest groups who politick and litigate on behalf of open borders and unrestricted immigration. These advocates decried the allegedly negative effects of the Court’s ruling on immigrants.

“This rule is an all-out assault on legal immigration,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Washington Post.

“The public charge rule is the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants,” [added] Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration expert at Cornell University’s law school.

But if the Trump administration’s new public charge rules are, indeed, an “all-out assault” in its “war on immigrants,” this is something that Congress can remedy. There is no need for the judiciary to intervene: that’s not the Court’s job.

Unsurprisingly, the hyperbolic rhetoric from partisans with a political agenda to grind doesn’t square with the facts, which are far more benign than these verbal volleys suggest.

“The policy would not apply to humanitarian programs for refugees and asylum recipients,” reports the Post. Moreover, an official with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service

said the policy will not be applied retroactively to those who have used benefits in the past; it will apply only to those who receive taxpayer-funded benefits after the rule takes effect in mid-October.

What’s more,

the change will have little to no effect on those who already have permanent resident status who are seeking to become naturalized U.S. citizens. ‘Naturalization applicants are not subject to a new admissibility determination and therefore are not generally subject to public charge determinations,’ said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

So much for the “war on immigrants.” In truth, the new rules are a modest attempt to update the definition of a public charge, so that the definition accounts for both cash and non-cash federal assistance.

I say update because as social assistance programs have grown and expanded, they increasingly include many non-cash benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, Meals on Wheels, the provision of housing, et al.

Yet, in the past, when determining who might be a public charge, these non-cash benefits were ignored. That might have made sense several generations ago when non-cash benefits were miniscule and non-existent. However, it makes little sense today, as non-cash benefits occupy an increasingly prominent place in the social safety net.

Partisans can debate the particulars of the Trump administration’s policy changes. The devil, as they say, is in the details. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, while applauding the Court’s decision, argues that there are real problem s with the administration’s public charge rules.

Perhaps, but the appropriate place to hash out the issue is in the policy-making branches of government—in Congress, principally, and, to a lesser extent, within the administration.

Doing so is no doubt laborious and difficult. Legislating isn’t easy and policy-making can be hard. But that is what liberty and self-government demand: hard work and effort, argument, persuasion, and consensus. A free and proud people should not want it any other way.

Feature photo credit: iStockphoto.com via National Public Radio.

Will Bernie and the Woke Progressives Lead the Democrats to Certain Defeat in November?

Will Bernie and the Woke Progressives Lead the Democrats to Certain Defeat in November?

By John R Guardiano on January 27, 2020

Are the Democrats blowing it? Are they about to hand the election to the one man they despise above all else, Donald J. Trump? That’s the fear of David Frum, who makes precisely that case in a brilliant and insightful essay in The Atlantic.

Frum, of course, is the intellectual leader of the Never Trump movement and someone who’s moved left politically in the past 15 years, ever since warning of the “axis of evil” as a speechwriter for George W. Bush in 2003. Still, he is a keen observer of the political scene and someone well worth listening to.

Frum focuses his firepower on Bernie Sanders, who continues to surge in the polls. Bernie, Frum argues, can’t win. His positions on matters of economic and foreign policy are too extreme and too easily caricatured and attacked to prevail against Trump.

Plus: he has real trouble appealing to suburban women and African Americans, “the two groups whose greater or lesser enthusiasm will make the difference for a Trump challenger in November,” Frum argues.

Equally worrisome: Bernie has something of a glass jaw. He “is a fragile candidate… [who has never] had to face serious personal scrutiny.” He and his team

“are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle.

“They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.”

But if Bernie is the Democrats’ weakest candidate and a surefire loser in a general election matchup against Trump, the source of his political appeal is nonetheless instructive, says Frum, and something that Dems need to understand, internalize and embrace.

Simply put, Bernie is an old-fashioned socialist who focuses on bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, healthcare, education, student debt relief, the social-safety net, et al. Other left-wing progressives running for president—Elizabeth Warren most notably—focus more on identity politics and on being “woke” or politically correct.

Frum is too polite to explicitly say it (especially in the pages of The Atlantic, which caters to woke, upscale progressives), but identity politics, left-wing cultural grievances, and PC purity tests are a real turnoff to most ordinary, working- and middle-class voters, black and white.

In fact, I believe that Trump’s 2016 win is far more attributable to the Democrats’ increasing embrace of cultural Marxism than it is to Trump’s embrace of economic populism.

Frum rightly fears that if the Dems continue to lean forward where they are weakest, on matters of culture and identity politics, they will lose in November to Trump. Thus he implores Democrats to lay off of their obsession with woke, identity politics, and, instead, to embrace Bernie’s more universal, broad-based, populist appeal.

It’s sound political advice, but will Democrats accept it?

Frum points to the fundamental divide within the Democratic Party: between the mostly white, affluent, upscale, college-educated progressives, for whom being woke is everything; and less affluent working- and middle-class blacks, who care more about the practical bread-and-butter issues that are at the heart of the Sanders’ campaign.

The white, affluent elite dominate the political dialogue and discussion and are the Dem’s donor class. However, the less affluent middle- and working class blacks are “in many ways the true base of the Democratic Party,” Frum says. They are the voters who will make all the difference in the South Carolina primary and, on Super Tuesday, in the South and industrial Midwest.

Ironically, Sanders has had real difficulty appealing to black voters; but Frum sees evidence that this is changing. “The latest CNN poll,” he notes, “showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference” (though Frum acknowledges that this CNN poll may be an outlier).

If the polls are correct, then Biden is Frum’s only real hope for stopping Sanders and beating Trump. Biden has held up well, but he is still 77 years old and clearly not the man or candidate he was 10 or 20 years ago. He’s lost a step, and father time can be unkind.

Yet, as Frum observes, “the left-but-not-woke idea does have power—including with many members of racial minorities.” What we don’t yet know is whether that idea has enough power to overcome the Democratic Party’s woke brigades, or whether, instead, that idea will become their latest victim. All eyes are on Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially more racially and ethnically diverse South Carolina and Nevada. Stay tuned.

Feature photo credit: Associated Press via VOA News.

Trump’s Presence at the March for Life Shows How Policy and Personality Interact to Make Him a Consequential President

Trump’s Presence at the March for Life Shows How Policy and Personality Interact to Make Him a Consequential President

By John R Guardiano on January 26, 2020

If you want to understand the Trump presidency, you need to understand Trump’s personality and psychological makeup.

However, if you want to understand Trump supporters, you need to understand not Trump’s personality, but rather his administration and its public policies: because while Trump supporters may not like or admire the man personally, they do like and admire his public policies.

Conversely, Trump may not think or care much about public policy. However, he cares intensely about what people, allies and enemies alike, think about him; and this, in turn, drives his actions as president. Abortion is a telling example.

The 47th annual March for Life took place Friday on the National Mall. Trump was the first president to attend the March for Life; and as the Was hington Examiner explains in detail, he is indisputably the most pro-life president in American history.

Critics complain that Trump is not really pro-life because of things he said and did before running for president, and because unlike, say, Ronald Reagan, he hasn’t seriously grappled with “ideas about inherent human dignity,” as Jonathan Last puts it.

But that’s ultimately irrelevant. We cannot discern what is in Trump’s heart, mind and soul. All we can judge and evaluate are his public policies; and, when it comes to abortion at least, those public policies are indisputably and consistently pro-life.

The interesting question is: why? I think the answer is obvious and it tells us a lot about Trump. While he may not have thought much about human life and human dignity, he does think in very Manichean terms: You are either with him or against him.

Trump is well aware of who is against him and who is with him—and who elected him president. He knows that the pro-life movement is politically strong (especially at the grassroots level in many red states, and especially within the Republican Party) and supportive of his presidency.

And while abortion may not be an issue Trump particularly cares about or has thought much about, he does know that pro-life voters are with him; and so, he is with them, too. This is what critics mean when they say Trump is a “transactional politician.” They mean he has no (or few) real convictions. Instead, he does for you if you do for him.

There is something to this; but at the same time, what this tends to mean in practice—and certainly, what it means for the pro-life movement—is that Trump can be more firm and resolute than even many so-called conviction politicians like Reagan and Thatcher: but only if you are his friend, ally and supporter, and only if he perceives you as such.

That is why even occasional Trump critics like GOP Senators Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul go out of their way to show that they are all-in for the president.

Indeed, Graham will sometimes criticize Trump for being too weak or dovish on foreign policy, while Paul will occasionally criticize him for the opposite reason: for supposedly being too much of a neocon warrior. However, both Graham and Paul leave no doubt in anyone’s mind: They support the president, and don’t you forget it!

For them, and for GOP officeholders more broadly, this is a political imperative. GOP congressmen and senators realize that, to retain any influence on Trump, the president must view them as allies, not enemies. There is no middle ground in Trump’s mind.

Ironically, then, that is why and how a president who never much thought about public policy, and still doesn’t, can nonetheless be one of the most significant drivers of public policy ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Equally ironic, it is also why people who probably don’t like Trump personally, and are not fans of his obnoxious tweets and other regrettable public utterances, can nonetheless be among his most steadfast champions and supporters.

Feature photo credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters via National Review.