Whistleblowing 2019

Ukranian call went too far, but impeachable?

On the one hand, it’s difficult to see a path by which Donald J. Trump is removed as president of the United States. Impeachment being a part of the nation’s political process, it might be easy to imagine the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passing, by simple majority, the articles of impeachment charging the president. It as equally as easy to envision the Republican-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required for the president’s removal from office, failing to get anywhere close to conviction.

So why go through the turmoil of an impeachment inquiry? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has resisted for a while now the calls from the left-defining side of her party to launch an impeachment inquiry. Hate her politics all you want, but she’s a shrewd political figure. She has wisely resisted those calls, mindful, we suspect, that choosing that path is unlike anything a leader of Congress ever considers doing. After all, the man sitting in the Oval Office was put there by the legitimate democratic processes of the nation. Undoing that ought to be a last, last resort.

The question is, has Donald Trump done something that merits pulling the trigger on the constitutional tools the founding fathers established to protect the presidency and the republic from the person who holds the office? Impeachment isn’t about a criminal offense, necessarily, but about a violation of his oath of office to recognize the Constitution’s limits and respect its authority over his office.

Surely, everyone can agree there are lines a president — any president — cannot cross. The discussion now is really about whether President Trump did just that.

When the sitting president of the United States asks another country’s new president to make sure his government investigates the son of a U.S. presidential challenger — in this case, Joe Biden — is Donald Trump crossing a line?

Some will say all is fair in politics these days, but goodness, we hope not. The president, whoever it is, is the most powerful political figure in the world, and he commands an executive branch with extraordinary powers. Those are intended to conduct the vital business of the U.S. government, not to be wielded as a weapon against political opponents.

In that now famous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump reminds Zelensky just how indebted Zelensky and his country should feel because “the United States has been very good to Ukraine.” Zelensky agrees not just 100 percent, but 1,000 percent.

The White House-released summary of the call really doesn’t show a lot of substance to the conversation. It’s clear Trump and Zelensky want to ensure the other knows they’re members of a mutual admiration society. Trump demonstrates through his comments he has only a few goals for the call:

Convince Zelensky European leaders aren’t as helpful to the Ukraine as the United States/Trump is.

To ask Zelensky a favor: Investigate a company called Crowdstrike, which figures into conspiracy theories Trump apparently believes. Those theories suggest the company is part of Democratic scheme to assert Russians interfered in the 2016 election, thereby putting the credibility of Trump’s victory in question.

To ask Zelensky another favor: To get together with U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to ferret out information about Joe Biden’s son and his role with a Ukrainian company. Again, these are largely debunked conspiracy theories advanced by websites Trump has a tendency to visit.

There is no subtlety in Trump’s requests. First, it’s establishing that Zelensky should feel that he owes the United States, and Donald Trump frequently demonstrates he believes his political interests and the United States are synonymous. Next, his requests to Zelensky involve nothing more than presidential politics — a desire to have a foreign government dig up dirt on Democrats in general and Joe Biden, potentially viewed as a threat to Trump’s political fortunes.

Donald Trump is using the power of the presidency for his own political purposes.

Why would the president ever declassify a phone conversation summary that could be evidence of behaviors worthy of impeachment? Releasing it proves he’s done nothing wrong, right?

We’re mindful of this once-upon-atime comment by candidate Trump: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Just more Trump bravado, right? No, President Trump almost daily demonstrates his attitude that he’s the greatest, that he can do no wrong. He lives by a very Nixonian interpretation that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Or impeachable.

We don’t think the founders ever envisioned a government that sets one individual above the nation’s laws. Beyond that, we’re certain they put the impeachment process in place as a remedy to presidential behaviors harmful to the nation and the office.

Is what Trump said with the Ukrainian president over the line for the presidency? Ask yourself this, if you’re a Republican: Had Barack Obama attempted the same thing with regard to Donald Trump’s candidacy, would that have been an abuse of the office?

Is it the end of Donald Trump? We doubt it, even if an argument can be made that it should be. As president and in his previous life as “The Donald,” it’s clear he’s struggled to recognize any boundaries for his behavior.

“I have impeached myself,” Richard Nixon said years after he resigned the presidency in the face of impeachment. If impeachment ever comes for Donald Trump, it will be the result of his own hubris.

As for congressional leaders, we’d rather they think about, seriously, where the line between party politics and loyalty to the American ideal rests. Democrats are just a little too much like sharks when they smell blood in the water. The frenzy, the winat-all-costs methodology makes it difficult to see their motives as anything but devotion to party.

As for Republicans, perhaps it would provide a little more comfort if they behaved out of concern for the presidency more than out of concern for this president. They’re in a defensive posture, appearing far more focused on ridiculing serious concerns raised solely by the words emanating from the president himself than on getting to the bottom of conduct we would classify as unbecoming for a U.S. president.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack both said it’s apparent there was no “quid pro quo” in the president’s conversation with Zelensky. Trump would certainly be proud of them. They’re (again) giving Trump every conceivable benefit of a doubt. Trump continues to redefine appropriate behavior within the presidency — not in a good way — largely because Republicans such as Arkansas’ delegation to Congress let him get away with it.

But there are other clear concerns: The whistleblower who started this entire episode asserts the Trump White House was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s phone call and filed it away on a separate and secret computer system. That’s troubling. Are we again going to discover 18 minutes of missing conversations?

In the United States of 2019, our national leaders simultaneously maintain a ridiculously high threshold for allegations of unethical, unconstitutional or criminal behavior within their own party and a ridiculously low threshold for believing the slightest complaint against their political enemies.

Is the transcript of a phone call to the Ukraine a smoking gun? It won’t matter as long as Republicans say Donald Trump can do no wrong.