For four months, since the release of the memorandum of the call between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, I have consistently said that Mr. Trump’s request for an investigation of Joe Biden and any effort to tie the release of military aid to investigations were improper and shouldn’t have happened. However, I do not believe these actions rise to the level where it would be necessary to remove a president from office.
The founders intended for impeachment to be extremely rare, and they required those seeking to remove the president to meet the burden of proving “high crimes and misdemeanors,” like treason or bribery. In this case, unlike in other impeachments, no crime was alleged. Although there may be circumstances where a crime isn’t necessary for a president to be impeached, to be impeached under such a circumstance would require meeting an even higher bar, and it wasn’t met here.
In addition, the House engaged in a rushed process that lacked fundamental fairness. The constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls it “the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president.” It was also the only purely partisan impeachment in history.
He then went on to come up with descriptions of three (count them, he managed to come up with three) of Trump’s accomplishments: lowering prescription drug costs, improving skills training, and combating the addiction crisis.
He concluded with words that ring as hollow as an empty barrel filled with hot air considering that Trump has turned mere angry partisanship into a clamoring cult of gullible worshippers (see video below).
If Congress acts we can begin to re-instill faith in our institutions and bridge the growing partisan divide. In these highly partisan times, it’s easy for both sides of the aisle to retreat even further into their ideological camps. But for the sake of the country, let’s look for what unites us instead.
This is yet another incredible series of interviews conducted by one of the best, perhaps underrated, interviewers in journalism.
Obviously senators, or at least most of them, are smarter than the people Jordan Klepper manages to get on camera (right) in his sociological experiments (above) as he travels the country for Trevor Noah’s show.
What all this boils down to is a toxic brew which is poisoning our democracy. It has two main ingredients, people like Portman and people like those who go to, or wish they could go to, Trump rallies. They are very different as people and the Portmans among them would be loathe to invite the later group over to their DC cocktail parties.
Together they could propel Trump into another term and words fail me to describe what that would mean for the country, and the free world.