Think what would happen if it were Obama facing trial

What if it were President Barack Obama who was the subject of the Senate impeachment trial? How would we feel then?

Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, suggests a question along those lines in his book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.” It’s one of several thought experiments that I suggest in order to step back from the hurly-burly in the Senate and interrogate our own principles and motivations.

The first approach, as Sunstein puts it, is this:

“Suppose that a president engages in certain actions that seem to you very, very bad. Suppose that you are tempted to think that he should be impeached. You should immediately ask yourself: Would I think the same thing if I loved the president’s policies, and thought that he was otherwise doing a splendid job?”

Alternatively, if you oppose impeachment and removal, Sunstein suggests you ask yourself: “Would I think the same thing if I abhorred the president’s policies, and thought that he was otherwise doing a horrific job?”

In practical terms, this amounts to: What if it were Obama who had been caught in this Ukraine scandal?

My guess is that if it were Obama, Republicans would be demanding witnesses (as they did in the 1999 trial of Bill Clinton).

Yet I suspect that many Democrats would also switch sides, finding it easier to excuse misconduct by someone they admired — and seeing it as more important in that situation to preserve executive privilege and leave it to voters to decide the matter in the fall. That’s why we owe it to ourselves, as a matter of intellectual honesty, to think through how we would react if it were the other guy on trial.

(Progressives may be scoffing that this exercise is unrealistic: Obama was meticulous in avoiding scandal and ethical conflicts. The Ukraine mess would have been out of character for Obama, while it is entirely in character for Trump. But Republicans will see this differently.)

The second thought experiment comes from another distinguished lawyer, Neal Katyal, in his new book “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”

“Imagine if it had worked,” Katyal suggests. “Imagine if our president had leveraged his role as commander in chief to convince a foreign power to open an investigation into his political opponent. Imagine if the president’s rival lost the primary because news broke that he was under investigation. Imagine if that meant the president faced a weaker candidate in November 2020 — and won reelection as a result.”

The foreign country could then blackmail our president by threatening to expose the corruption, gaining leverage over our foreign policy. Meanwhile, the president might abuse presidential power in other ways in the belief that impunity was complete. If all this eventually became public, and truth does have a way of trickling out, this would have devastating consequences for the legitimacy of American elections.

This thought experiment perhaps isn’t so far-fetched. We know now that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine caused alarm in the White House and the intelligence community, with National Security Adviser John Bolton likening it to a “drug deal.”

In short, Trump’s plan almost succeeded — and in any case, he will get away with it in the sense that he is sure to be acquitted by the Senate. When Republicans suggest that Trump did nothing wrong, what message does that impunity send to Trump and to future presidents?