Posts tagged as “impeachment”

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.

Given that we’re less than 10 months out from the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election, it is reasonable and legitimate to conclude that:

a) what President Trump did vis-a-vis Ukraine was wrong and perhaps even impeachable. However,

(b) because of the proximity to the election, he should not be convicted by the Senate and removed from office. Instead,

(c) the voters should decide Trump’s fate at the ballot box.

If Republicans were making that argument, there would be little to quarrel with.

Unfortunately, too many Republicans have insisted that Trump did nothing wrong: that he is the victim of a political witch-hunt and an ongoing political vendetta by angry Democrats who have never reconciled themselves to his election as president.

Trump himself, moreover, has never acknowledged any wrongdoing. To the contrary: he continues to insist that his phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a “perfect conversation” and “totally appropriate.”

This is patently false and a complete denial of reality. In truth, as we now know beyond the shadow of a doubt, Trump 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.

This is the very definition of an abuse of power and a violation of the public trust.

Now, whether this rises to the level of an impeachable offense is legitimately debatable. And whether the Senate should convict Trump for this offense and remove him from office is even more debatable. But there can be no debate about the underlying offense and wrongdoing by the president.

The facts don’t lie, but political partisans often do. And too many Republicans, in Congress and the media, are lying and spinning about what Trump did, why he was impeached, and why he is now being tried in the Senate.

In so doing, they are contributing mightily to a debilitating national cynicism that ascribes all political disputes to a raw lust for power and revenge.

To the cynics, and to the wild-eyed partisans, there can be no principled, good-faith disagreements, just high-pitched, life-and-death political struggles in which anything goes. Just win, baby. Truth, after all, is relative.

This, of course, does not serve our country and our politics well. It results in a hardening of the partisan arteries, political arteriosclerosis, and legislative paralysis. Nothing gets done because the two sides refuse even to communicate honestly, fight fairly, and legislate respectfully.

For Republicans eager to secure the border, check the regulatory state, reform entitlements, rebuild the military, and liberalize healthcare, this is an ominous and foreboding development.

Worse still, by failing to speak honestly and forthrightly about Trump’s wrongdoing, Republican officeholders are handicapping themselves when the next Democratic President abuses her power and authority to, say, ban and confiscate guns, grant amnesty and citizenship rights to illegal immigrants, limit options and choices in the health insurance marketplace, force local schools to accommodate transgender identity and “inclusion,” and make college “free.”

What standing, after all, will Republican congressman and senators have to oppose these naked power grabs after they spent the better part of a year rationalizing and excusing Trump’s abuse of power?

A republic if you can keep it, warned Benjamin Franklin. Let’s at least try to keep it by honestly calling out wrongdoing no matter where it occurs, and regardless of which side of the political aisle it originates. That may not mean convicting Trump and removing him from office; but it surely means leveling with the American people about his abuse of power and wrongdoing.

Note: Tim Carney and Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner, and the editors at National Review, share similar thoughts about the Senate Republicans vis-a-vis the Trump impeachment.

Feature photo/illustration credit: QuotesGram via Tunnel Wall.