Danielle McLaughlin
The capitulation of the Republican Party to President Donald Trump is now complete. Yesterday, GOP senators voted by the smallest of majorities to block the introduction of documents and testimony in the Senate trial of the impeached president.
They did so to avoid having to call former national security adviser John Bolton, whose leaked book manuscript reveals information damaging to the president and at the heart of the impeachment trial.
First, that Trump asked Bolton and other senior advisers to aid in the pressure campaign against Ukraine to commence investigations into Joe Biden and his son. Second, that the president told Bolton explicitly that promised military aid to Ukraine was being held up until the investigations were opened.
The vote renders the Senate trial a sham, and sets two dangerous precedents.
First, that a president may trade American foreign policy decisions for domestic political favours with impunity. Second, that a president may simply ignore demands for documents and testimony in congressional investigations of potential misdeeds, and obstruct his way to acquittal.
The GOP, or ‘‘Grand Old Party’’, has for decades characterised itself as the party of principled democracy and the rule of law. Republican presidents ended slavery, directed the desegregation of public schools after the Supreme Court rendered segregation unconstitutional, and ushered in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall.
Republican administrations – including famously during the Reagan White House’s Iran-Contra affair – submitted to congressional investigation and oversight.
Even Richard Nixon, who resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate break-in, acknowledged his own wrongdoing and the harm it wrought on the office and the country.
It is now the party of Trump. And it is complicit in the president’s degradation of democracy.
In service of his own political permanence, Donald Trump has employed tactics learned as a survivor of multiple bankruptcies.
As president, he has taken the position that his office gives him ‘‘the right to do whatever I want’’.
His lawyers have advanced legal theories in federal court that are preposterous on their face – from blanket claims of executive privilege shielding almost all of his activity, to arguments that he is beyond the reach of criminal investigators.
The president has used legal procedure to stymie claims against him.
His legal teams seek summary dismissals to nip nascent lawsuits in the bud. They appeal losses all the way up to the highest relevant court. Both are tactics designed to delay, or avoid facing, any factual, substantive claims against him.
One of the president’s impeachment attorneys, Professor Alan Dershowitz, argued at the Senate trial this week that ‘‘if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment’’. In other words, Trump’s reelection serves him. Ergo, it serves the public interest.
And perhaps that is the essence of it. President Trump has never grasped the separate identities of the president and the office of the presidency, or the burden on the former to preserve the latter.
Instead, the state seems to exist only to further his goals. Which, of course, is how we got to impeachment in the first place.
The president wanted foreign help to smear a political rival. And he waved around taxpayer-funded and congressionally approved military aid in the hopes of getting it.
Early in his presidency, Trump asked FBI director James Comey for loyalty, and fired him when he couldn’t have it.
Trump did the same to his first attorney-general,
Jeff Sessions, whom he never forgave for recusing himself from the Mueller investigation. What else is an attorney-general good for, supposed Trump, if he can’t protect you?
Because the GOP senators have blocked all witnesses, including Bolton (whose testimony Americans already know will be damning), the president will be cleared. But he will not be exonerated.
The Senate trial had no deliberations, no witnesses, and no documents presenting either side of the case.
And free of the trial (although not free of the permanent stain of impeachment), the president will now further abandon the rules and norms that bind him, emboldened by the subservience of Republicans and the powerlessness of Democrats.
Yesterday marked 414 years since the death in 1606 of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the British Houses of Parliament. He failed, was arrested, and committed suicide at the hangman’s noose just as he was to be hung, drawn and quartered.
Yesterday’s decision by Republican senators is the metaphoric equivalent of a plot to blow up the US Congress. Except they succeeded.
They have acquiesced to a president who undermines the rule of law they swore an oath to protect.
Yesterday, they took a new oath: All for Trump, and Trump for . . . Trump.
Danielle McLaughlin is the Sunday Star-Times’ US correspondent. She is a lawyer, author, and political and legal commentator, appearing frequently on US and New Zealand TV and radio. She is also an ambassador for #ChampionWomen, which aims to encourage respectful, diverse, and thoughtful conversations. Follow Danielle on Twitter at @MsDMcLaughlin.