We begin today’s roundup with an editorial from Christianity Today, making the case that the President should be removed from office for his violations of the Constitution and immoral conduct:
The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives [as seen by the evangelical community] can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character. [...]
To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.
Emma Green at The Atlantic has an interview with the writer, Mark Galli, who explains why evangelicals should no longer weigh the “pros” of a Trump presidency against his misconduct:
Galli: [...] They’ll consider me partisan, that I’m a closet Democrat—which I’m not. I’m independent. They’re going to say that Trump appoints pro-life justices; he’s working for religious freedom. And it occurred to me today, as I was writing the editorial, that the “on the one hand, on the other hand” logic of whether you’re going to support Trump or not—that falls apart at some point.
Imagine, for example, that a woman is being verbally abused by her husband. He’s a great father—he gets along with the kids, and he’s a great supporter. So you think, All right, he’s verbally abusive to me; he has kind of a hot temper. But he’s got these other things going for him, so I’m not going to rock the boat too much. I might try to get him to calm down, but I can live with it.
Then he starts to become violent, and dangerously violent. He’s still a good provider. He still loves the kids. But nobody would say, “You need to weigh this!” They would say, “Get the man out of the house immediately.” The moral balancing no longer applies.
And here is The New York Times calling out Republicans who are putting party over country:
It isn’t supposed to be this way. There’s plenty of blame to go around for the intense — really, infantilizing — degree of polarization that has overwhelmed American politics across the past 40 years. But the nihilism of this moment — the trashing of constitutional safeguards, the scorn for facts, the embrace of corruption, the indifference to historical precedent and to foreign interference in American politics — is due principally to cowardice and opportunism on the part of Republican leaders who have chosen to reject their party’s past standards and positions and instead follow Donald Trump, all the way down.
It’s a lot to ask of Republicans to insist on holding their own leader accountable, just as that was a lot to expect of Democrats during the Clinton impeachment inquiry. But while many Democrats then criticized President Bill Clinton and some voted to impeach him, Republican lawmakers would not breathe a word against Mr. Trump on Wednesday.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times analyzes the Republican attempts to boast about Trump’s popular vote total:
The Republican identification with Trump is total. Again and again, histrionic Republican congressmen equated hatred of the president with hatred of themselves and hatred of the sacred 63 million. They spoke of Trump with an awe and a maudlin devotion bordering on religious; Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican, declared that Trump had been given less due process than Jesus Christ himself.
If Trump is a martyr, who are his persecutors? You could watch the debate with the sound off and understand. All day, Republican speeches delivered by old white men alternated with Democratic speeches from women, people of color and young people. White men make up 90 percent of the Republican caucus and 38 percent of the Democratic one, and the day dramatized the representational gulf in the starkest visual terms.
Josh Barro reminds us that the president was impeached and the sky did not fall:
I understand the president’s dilemma. On one hand, he wants the stock market to hit record highs, so he can brag about it. On the other hand, he wants to feel essential to the stock market’s strength. This latter imperative is why he has repeatedly warned that impeaching him would lead to a stock-market crash, which has not materialized now that he has actually been impeached.
Of course, even if impeachment is important for stocks, we shouldn’t have expected the stock market to move on Wednesday’s impeachment vote. The market reacts to news, and from the market’s perspective, the vote wasn’t news because we all knew in advance what the vote result would be. But the market does not even seem to have been moved that much by real impeachment news, such as the unexpected political developments early this fall that led Democratic leaders who had been resisting activists’ demands for impeachment to change their minds and roll toward impeachment.
On a final note, over at The Atlantic, law professor Lisa Kern Griffin explains why Senate Republicans are trying to block witness testimony, explaining that perjury still matters in our country:
Resistance to live testimony arises because, while dishonesty and disinformation have become regular features of America’s national discourse, witnesses under oath cannot lie with impunity. Should they commit perjury, they may find that “court is one of those places where facts still matter,” as Judge Amy Berman Jackson put it to Paul Manafort at his recent sentencing for, among other things, lying to investigators. [...] As the Supreme Court stated in the Bryson case 50 years ago: “Our legal system provides methods for challenging the Government’s right to ask questions—lying is not one of them.”