Making a sham of process
“Laws are like sausages,” Otto von Bismarck supposedly said. “It is better not to see them being made.”
Suffering through far too many hours of the House impeachment this past week reminded me of the truth of that political quip.
Making foreign policy is just as messy, as the parade of witnesses from the state department who appeared before Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee proved again and again.
Ambassador Yovanovitch, Ambassador Volker, Col. Vindman, Kent, Taylor, Sondland, Williams, Hill … .
Schiff’s carefully chosen cast of “fact witnesses” was called in last week in hopes of proving that President Trump should be impeached for allegedly holding up U.S. military assistance to Ukraine to benefit his personal political interests at home.
They testified for days about what they presumed the president wanted to happen in Ukraine, what they thought he said and what they heard secondhand or thirdhand that he had apparently said.
Of all the witnesses who testified, the only one who did the right thing in the confusion of Ukraine was Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.
When he kept hearing different versions of what Trump wanted to see the Ukrainian government do or say about corruption before the hold on U.S. military aid was lifted, he dialed up the White House and asked the president directly what the heck he wanted.
That’s when Trump blurted his famous line, “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.”
Schiff’s witnesses were supposed to make the case that President Trump was guilty of offering the president of Ukraine a quid pro quo — or guilty of bribery, or abuse of power, or obstructing Congress, or too many tweets, or any impeachable “crime” that works.
The quid-pro-quo charge was the most idiotic.
Getting “something for something” is how presidents, governors, mayors, kings, dictators and popes have dealt with each other forever in the real world.
What Trump is accused of doing wrong in Ukraine is small potatoes to everyone but the desperate Democrats who are going to be real sorry they started down their Impeachment Highway to Nowhere.