One of my father’s favorite books was, How to Lie with Statistics. The book’s theme: “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Republicans lie with statistics. For instance, one Republican had a similar map on display during the impeachment hearings to illustrate that mountains, deserts, and other sparsely populated areas of America, love Trump. The first of the following four razor-thin arguments, distorts reality using factual but incomplete data.
“63 million American voters voted for Trump. Impeaching him nullifies their choice.”
This argument rings hollow because it doesn’t mention that 66 million Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, and an additional 7 million Americans voted for one of several third-party candidates. This means that ten million more voters voted against Trump than for Trump. If you buy the argument that impeachment should not overturn the will of the voters, then Trump should be impeached because his presidency does NOT reflect the will of the majority of voters.
“The Democrats wanted to impeach President Trump all along, so that means there is no justification in impeaching him now.”
This is grossly misleading. It is true that a few “radical” progressive Democrats wanted to impeach Trump all along. I know, because I was one of those Democrats—one of those few Democrats who wanted to see Trump impeached because Pence doesn’t have the balls to initiate using the 25th Amendment to remove an unfit, unstable President. Overgeneralizations are always dangerous and never accurate. Not even the Mueller Report condemned Trump enough for Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership to want to impeach Trump. Not until someone blew the whistle and demonstrated Trump was colluding with the Ukrainian—while he was denying colluding with the Russians—did Pelosi and company finally come aboard and realize impeachment was the necessary choice. Besides, this is no defense. If a crook finally gets caught by the police for an egregious recent crime, it is no defense to say he is innocent just because the police suspected for a while that he got away with previous crimes.
“Impeachment is a partisan and divisive.”
This is an argument of the kettle calling the pot black. It is the Republicans who are partisan and divisive! It is the Republicans who are putting party over principle and getting re-elected as their primary objective. Remember Barry Goldwater? Probably not, but he was as right-wing a Republican conservative as you can get, and wrote the book The Conscience of a Conservative. But Goldwater did have a conscience, and when he realized Nixon was nothing but a crook who obstructed justice, Goldwater convinced Nixon he needed to resign rather than be impeached, for the good of the country. Simply put, Goldwater put his love of country before his love of party. There wasn’t one Republican in the House Wednesday willing to do the same. And I sadly doubt there will be one in the Senate. So instead, the Republicans project their extreme partisanship onto the Democrats implying that partisanship is only reason the Democrats have to impeach Trump.
“Trump didn’t break the law because Ukraine finally got the money.”
This argument is not only razor thin, but has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. “High crimes and misdemeanors” doesn’t literally mean one should only be impeached for committing a crime. (Nor does it mean committing an actual crime is always an impeachable offense.) A President should be impeached if he is clearly unfit for office, violates his oath to uphold the Constitution, and abuses his position of power solely for his own personal interests. Yet only two articles of impeachment were selected (out of dozens of others that could have been included, such as separating children from their parents and locking them in cages), because these two articles demonstrate Trump did clearly violate the law.
Simply asking a foreign power for a personal political favor was illegal regardless of whether the favor was granted or not. It alone was an impeachable offense. Besides, Trump had no intensions of giving the Ukrainians the money until Trump got what he wanted. There was a quid- pro-quo: “Nice country you have here. What a shame if something should happen to it. Now I'd like you to do me a favor..." The money was only released to the Ukrainians after the whistle-blower revealed the scandal. Trump got caught and attempted damage control. Claiming Trump is innocent because he got caught before completing his criminal act is like saying a bank robber is innocent because he got caught while still inside the bank, “Hey, I’m innocent! No money left the bank.”
It is my fervent hope that all of those Trumptorians who argued against impeachment won’t have to worry about their own personal historical legacy—because they will be voted out of office so soon they won’t even have a historical legacy. Their arguments don’t just ring hollow because they aren’t true, they don’t even make enough sense to be considered arguments. The Republicans didn’t make a case for not impeaching Trump; they just made a lot of noise.
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