Bridge to abuse of power

Forgive Chief Justice John Roberts if he’s suffering a little déjà vu. This week, he’s presiding over the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. One of two charges against the president is abuse of power. Just a week ago, in Roberts’ day job, the nation’s highest court heard an appeal by former Chris Christie aide Bridget Kelly in the Bridgegate scandal, which centered around shutting down access lanes to the George Washington Bridge to punish the Fort Lee mayor’s failure to endorse Christie’s re-election.

Kelly claims she is innocent of federal property fraud because she (and Bill Baroni) didn’t literally take anything from anyone. (We disagree.) Instead, her lawyer argued, subverting the traffic lanes was “just an abuse of power, a political abuse of power.”

On the other side of the Supreme Court chamber that day, Trump’s Justice Department — while of course agreeing that nakedly twisting public policy to serve personal political means is an abuse of power — insisted that the Christie officials did in fact commit criminal acts: “[Defendants] don’t get a free pass simply because their motive happened to be political.”

As House managers convincingly argued: Unlike those two local officials, a sitting president is largely immune to criminal prosecution. The Founding Fathers crafted impeachment as a remedy for blatant political abuses of power.

If creating an epic traffic jam to retaliate against a political foe is abuse of power, found to be criminal by a jury and a federal appeals panel, what do you call shaking down a foreign government to smear a political opponent?