The Starr of the show

Kenneth Starr defended President Trump before the U.S. Senate on Monday by arguing that we’ve started impeaching way too much and taken to weaponizing impeachment.

Then he pulled out a blue dress, pointed to a stain and said, “Right here, for example.”

I’m kidding. Well, about the second paragraph, not the first. Starr was the one surely kidding in the first paragraph. He’s a well-known card and cutup, as you know.

I’m kidding again.

In his defense, let us stipulate that Starr did not weaponize impeachment against Bill Clinton the mid1990s.

He weaponized the independent counsel statute. It was the Republican House that then weaponized the Church Lady pornography of Starr’s report.

When the originally appointed independent counsel for Whitewater was getting ready to wrap up with no findings against Clinton, Starr, a noted Republican judge, accepted the partisan assignment from Republican members of Congress to take the reins. He then kept the investigation active until Clinton did something predictably unwise—engage in extramarital sex and, naturally, lie about it.

Everyone knew that lust and lying would get Clinton if anything would.

Starr’s presentation to the U.S. Senate on Monday afternoon—as one of Trump’s old-timer celebrity lawyers from a century past—was ponderous, smarmy, faux-reverential, sanctimonious and altogether ridiculous.

He said we’d only impeached a president once until the last 50 years, during which we have done so three times—one of them aborted by resignation.

But then Starr seemed to find two of the last three impeachments appropriate, leading one to conclude that his point was not really that we impeach too often but that he only wished we hadn’t impeached Trump this time.

Starr said we prepared properly to impeach Richard Nixon before he resigned. He said Nixon had done corrupt things. But he stressed that the action against Nixon was significantly bipartisan, suggesting, it seems, that he thinks it’s best not to impeach a president if members of his party go along unanimously with his cover-up.

Starr then seemed also to excuse the impeachment of Clinton—which got a few Democratic votes and was based on Starr’s own ad nauseam partisan investigation. He did so on the basis that there was an actual crime, perjury, alleged.

He argued that the requirement for a specific transgression of the criminal code was implied by the constitutional reference to “high crimes,” as well as by common law and historical precedent.

Trump, he pointed out, is not accused of a statutory crime.

So, after saying we impeach presidents too often these days but then offering sympathetic context for two of the last three, he seemed to be saying it was best to cut it out with the third. Three in a half-century must be his magic number.

He proposed treating Trump the same way a Baylor University administrator might treat Baylor football players.

That juxtaposition was entirely mine, not his. After all, Starr couldn’t be expected to bring up in Trump’s impeachment his own failed tenure as president of Baylor during a football program sex scandal to which he was decidedly less attentive than to Clinton’s versatile use of cigars.

Starr got demoted to Baylor’s chancellor, and then quit that post and taught at the law school, and then quit that. Then he did some Republican legal apologia on Fox, which caused Trump to want him on his defense team, which is what had Starr droning on the Senate floor Monday afternoon.

For the record: The Constitution does not define “high crimes.” It does give the House of Representatives sole authority to impeach. The House of Representatives decides what’s a high crime and what isn’t. The Senate then agrees or disagrees.

A real defense of Trump, then, would be a rebuttal of the impeachment particulars.

But that is not convenient for Starr or other Republicans. That’s because the particulars have been controverted only in regard to whether Trump specifically tied Ukraine’s receipt of congressionally approved military aid to that nation’s conceding to open an investigation embarrassing to Joe Biden, Trump’s possible re-election opponent.

But now we have the undisputed report—first offered by the world’s greatest newspaper, The New York Times—that Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has written in a forthcoming book that Trump specifically told him he didn’t want Ukraine to get the money until Biden was under investigation.

It’s enough to make one wonder if Trump is as strapped for a competent defense as he is for competent defenders.