D.C. and the do-right rule

Bud Cummins, the conservative lawyer and former federal prosecutor in Little Rock who lined up strong for Donald Trump as soon as Chris Christie got out of the Republican presidential race, has been bugging Trump detractors on social media.

He wants them—he seems to dare them—to cite a specific crime that Trump has committed in his actions leading to the impeachment inquiry.

It’s a diversionary tactic, like practically everything else Republicans are saying lately. It’s yet another example of pleading not guilty by reason of changing the subject.

Impeachment doesn’t require a citation from the criminal code. It requires a majority of the House of Representatives asserting “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a constitutional phrase left undefined.

Alexander Hamilton said a crime wasn’t required to impeach. Founders borrowed the phrasing from common law, which applies it generally as an abuse of power. Using the White House as a campaign office and federal dollars as domestic campaign leverage, for example.

If the House acts on impeachment in a way the Senate deems frivolous, the Senate acquits. At the next election, the people decide the better behavior.

Cummins doesn’t want us to focus on the outrage to American sensibility of Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president—or, I presume, on the president’s double-down confession on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday when he called for the authoritarian communist state of China to investigate potential Democratic rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son.

Cummins wants us to stay busy thumbing through the law books for an applicable citation.

Do you remember those movie plots about American citizens getting in trouble in foreign countries and finding help at the American embassy? Trump is rewriting those scripts. He’s telling foreign countries to sic ’em if they are political threats to him.

He is saying that he is the state; that his interest is America’s, and that American financial aid and American trade policy are his personal tools to be leveraged in advancement of his personal political interest.

He is telling an oppressive state like China to get after that guy who might be his Democratic opponent for re-election. He is telling a struggling nation like Ukraine, precariously in the shadow of Vladimir Putin, to investigate that same man.

Then he mentions separately—as if to avoid a flagrant quid pro quo and impose only an implied one—the pending matters of military aid to Ukraine and high-stakes trade negotiations with China.

So Bud asks where’s the crime, at least in the law books.

Several knowledgeable people have said that seeking something of campaign value from a foreign country could be a criminal violation of campaign finance laws. Others have cited bribery, which the impeachment article specifically cites as grounds. Others mention intimidation of witnesses in Trump’s subsequent attempt to smear a whistle-blower and that whistle-blower’s sources.

But the fact is that, if a majority so votes, the House may impeach Trump simply on Lou Holtz’s “do-right rule.”

Aging Razorback football fans remember that, surely. It was 1977. Holtz was coach of the Razorbacks, who would in two weeks line up in the Orange Bowl against No. 2 Oklahoma.

Holtz suspended three key players for reasons that would eventually become known but that he didn’t want to reveal. So, badgered, he said the three players were out of the game because they had broken the do-right rule.

For Trump to get on the phone to the Ukraine president and say he needed the favor of an investigation into a political rival, and to do so with the implied leverage of military aid, is not to do right.

And it’s even worse to urge publicly that the Chinese, of all people, investigate his political opponent, and to urge such a thing only a few sentences before mentioning that China will be re-engaging with us on trade talks soon and that we will have lots of leverage if they don’t do what we want.

Was he saying, “Get me smut on Joe and I’ll cut you a deal on soybeans”?

He practically was.

Seriously—there was a time when even conservative Republican Americans would have been outraged at the very hint of using an authoritarian communist regime as an investigative tool against an American citizen for the personal political advantage of the sitting American president.

I can hear them now, those conservative Republican Americans. They’re exclaiming: Do-right rule? How about Hunter Biden breaking the do-right rule?

I’d say impeach him as well if he held any office in which to be impeached.

That Hunter Biden cashed in unethically if not illegally, which seems by myriad investigations to be the right conclusion, is irrelevant to another man’s highest-level misadventure with the do-right rule.

I’m not saying House Democrats must impeach. I’m not yet saying they should; that’s why they investigate.

But I’m saying they can, justifiably, simply on the self-impeaching words of this president.