A debacle perpetrated by 2 parties

This is the best way to describe and regard the impeachment debacle the country has endured: A partisan railroad job by Democrats in the House, followed by a partisan whitewash by Republicans in the Senate.

Democrats long ago lost any credibility in claiming to be motivated by a sincere commitment to protecting constitutional norms. From the beginning, this was a political exercise, designed not to hold to account President Trump, but to inflict damage on candidate Trump before the 2020 election.

Democrats contradicted themselves at every turn. House Democrats rushed impeachment on a political schedule, wanting it out of the way before Christmas. They publicly justified the quick pace on the grounds that immediate action was necessary to prevent Trump from again abusing his office to affect the 2020 election. And then Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to convey the impeachment articles to the Senate for a month.

There was a hole in House Democrats’ impeachment case. A variety of witnesses testified that they assumed or understood that Trump was withholding military aid to Ukraine and a meeting with its president, pending the public announcement of an investigation into the Bidens. But only one of the witnesses had talked directly with Trump about the matter, and he proved to be unreliable and inconsistent.

The House declined to go to court to compel testimony from individuals and administration officials who might have had direct conversations with Trump about the matter. The claim at that point was that such testimony was unnecessary. The case was a slam dunk without it.

And then Democrats impeached the president for not cooperating with subpoenas they chose not to seek to enforce. And claimed that there could not be a fair Senate trial without the very same witnesses they said, in the House, were unnecessary to make the case.

Any doubt that this was a political exercise, and not a reluctant fulfilling of a solemn constitutional duty, was removed when, like synchronized swimmers, House Democrats changed the way they publicly described Trump’s offense not based upon new evidence, but upon new focus group research.

House Republicans generally echoed Trump’s assertion that his call with the Ukrainian president and his actions regarding the aid and meeting were an immaculate conception. A perfect performance by a president who measures himself as did Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.

In acquitting Trump on the abuse of power charge, some Senate Republicans, including Arizona’s Martha McSally, brought themselves to calling Trump’s actions “inappropriate.”

That’s far from sufficient. “Inappropriate” is George W. Bush giving Angela Merkel a back rub. What Trump did was an abuse of his position as president.

Trump tried to induce or compel a foreign government to conduct an investigation into citizens of the United States who were not under investigation by the U.S. government.

This would be an abuse of the presidency if the citizens involved were Joe and Jim Blow. That it was Joe Biden, a potential political opponent, and his son substantially compounds the seriousness of the abuse.

The question should have been whether the abuse was large enough to warrant removal from office and from the 2020 ballot.

My view is that it was not. Trump was distrustful of Ukraine for a variety of reasons. A meeting was held. The aid was released within the budget year for which Congress appropriated it.

Is this letting Trump off the hook because he got caught? In part. But before the people’s choice for president is removed from office and the preferred nominee of a major party denied the opportunity to run, the harm to the body politic and our constitutional structure should be concrete, and not merely theoretical or feigned.

That, however, is a political judgment, as the framers intended impeachment ultimately to be. I would respect those who sincerely conclude that what Trump attempted to do was a large enough abuse in itself to warrant removal, even if he didn’t end up actually doing it.

However, given how partisanship has suffused the case for impeachment, it is hard to credit any senator voting for conviction with such sincerity, except for Mitt Romney.

I would have been inclined to so credit Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on voting to convict on the abuse of power charge, if she hadn’t also voted to convict on the phony obstruction of Congress charge. The extent to which Congress can compel executive branch witnesses and documents is a legal gray area. Saying that a president should be removed from office for asserting his side of the legal argument isn’t taking the separation of powers seriously.

This debacle should be an occasion for all sides to step back and try to gain some perspective and ballast. Such is the sorry state of our politics that, instead, it’s likely to be a partisan accelerant all around.