THE HEARINGS: IN PRAISE OF OUR CONSTITUTION

America got a civics lesson last week as three patriots testified before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment probe into President Donald J. Trump. There, before the television cameras, the country saw how the Constitution was designed to work.  Whatever flaws the    230

year-old document had at its inception and, for that matter, still has, the nation got a tutorial in what’s right about it. Americans could say at week’s end maybe things haven’t gone to hell in a handbasket after all.  Maybe the system of checks and balances works.

State Department official George Kent, the

Kent, Taylor, and Yovanovitch preparing to testify at  Trump impeachment hearing

current U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, and former  Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told much the same story in their riveting testimony. Trump held up U.S. military aid in an attempt to bribe Ukraine's president into announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Only the most partisan Trump backers now contend the President didn’t engage in attempted bribery.   

The Scene

When Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Cal) convened the hearings Wednesday, the

impeachment inquiry moved into a new phase. Committee members knew what the witnesses would say because those witnesses had given sworn testimony in closed-door depositions. Now, it was showtime, so the American people could see what the investigators had found.

The hearings aimed at the key audiences in this saga. A vote in the House impeaching Trump now seems a foregone conclusion. Whether he stays or goes, therefore, depends on potentially persuadable Republican senators who might support ousting Trump and swing voters (the 15-25% of the country that doesn’t have its mind made up) whose support for conviction might produce those Republican votes in the Senate.

The Witnesses

Kent and Taylor, men with long histories of unflappable, professional

government service in administrations headed by both Democrats and Republicans demonstrated personal appeal and exhaustive knowledge of the subject at issue and of their Ukraine jobs. Both challenged Trump's credibility in

ways that arguably overcame the inherent power of his office. Both eschewed politics, making Republicans look small in trying to paint them as partisan hacks.

It was Yovanovitch who, thanks in part to an insane blunder by Trump, ended the first round of hearings as a star.  When she left the hearing room Friday after, the crowd erupted in spontaneous applause, sending chills down the spines of Americans across the nation. During her testimony, Trump attacked Yovanovitch

in a mean-spirited Tweet, blaming her for unrest in Somalia, one of the early stops in her 33-year career as a foreign service officer. Schiff read her the Tweet and she acknowledged she found it “very intimidating.”

 

Schiff told her some members of Congress "take witness intimidation very, very seriously," a hint an

article of impeachment might well include that charge. Commentators and legal observers noted that a specific provision of the United States Code forbids witness intimidation. Not long after

Trump’s Tweet, a federal jury convicted long time Trump associate Roger Stone of witness tampering and six other felonies carrying a potential prison sentence totaling fifty years.

If the testimony of Kent, Taylor, and Yovanovitch wasn’t enough, a development late Friday made things even worse for Trump and his allies. When Taylor testified Wednesday, he revealed he’d just learned that a member of his embassy staff overheard Trump on a phone call with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland talking about seeking an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election allegations.  Taylor hadn’t known of the call when he gave his deposition.

        

The staff member surfaced Friday night, appearing for his own deposition and offering an opening statement describing the call he overheard. David Holmes’s account of the call torpedoed one Republican defense – that witnesses like Taylor, Kent, and Yovanovitch had only provided “hearsay,” since they hadn’t actually heard Trump seeking the investigations. 

The Genius of Our Constitution

We will in the future say more about the meaning of the constitution and its role in this impeachment exercise. Suffice it to say now that what we've seen demonstrates the hope and the cynicism embedded in the document.  Donald Trump is being held to account because the framers set up a system that recognized the difficulty in dealing with a corrupt, lawless leader. The past week demonstrates that as perhaps never before. 

 

The hope in the constitution lies in the fact it contains the tools for dealing with someone like Trump. Congress checks the executive branch through institutional mechanisms like the power of the purse, the oversight function, and, ultimately, impeachment. Though Trump has tried frustrating the process by preventing his lieutenants from testifying, career public servants in the executive branch like Kent,

Taylor and Yovanovitch defied him and testified anyway.  The framers no doubt understood personal courage would come into play a some point. If Trump wins re-election, we wonder if he will push these brave men and women out of public service and replace them with enablers willing to do his bidding.

There is more. Bad actors sometimes require a cynical approach, meaning the courts and criminal prosecution have their roles, as the Roger Stone verdict demonstrates.  Where would the Watergate-based impeachment of Richard Nixon have been without the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in the Nixon v. United States tapes case? 

 

Our constitution wasn’t and isn’t perfect. This isn't the place for expounding on the

evil of the three-fifths compromise and other flaws. We can get to them later.  This is the place, however, for pointing out that what

we saw last week shows why this nation has survived as long as it has and maybe why we’ll survive the calamity of the Trump presidency.   

DEMOCRATIC DEBATE IV: SHOOTING THE ARROWS IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

The fourth debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential nominating contest looked somewhat like the three that preceded it – candidates behind brightly colored

Democratic Candidates of Dabate Four

PhotoCred: The Daily Dot

lecterns, well known media figures asking the questions, and a live audience made up mostly of Democratic true believers who knew the applause lines. At the end, the pundit class proclaimed several participants as big winners, but said the race wouldn’t change much as a result of the evening’s proceedings on an obscure college campus in Ohio.

Looks deceive sometimes. This debate was very different from the ones that took place earlier in Miami, Detroit, and Houston. The difference lay in who got hunted, which showed how much the race has changed, just in the month since the September debate in Houston.

In the earlier events, former Vice President Joe Biden

served as prey for the other candidates. California Senator Kamala Harris, for example, got a big polling boost (which faded) from taking on Biden about school busing and his record on racial issues during  his long career in the United States Senate. Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro tackled Biden’s immigration record while serving in the Obama administration. Others also took shots at Biden during those first three debates.

All About Warren

Moving up in the polls and becoming a front runner

- maybe THE front runner – comes with a price. Elizabeth Warren paid that price in the fourth debate. When the Massachusetts senator took a narrow lead in some national polls and several polls in early primary states, it became clear she’d receive incoming fire on the debate stage. Her competitors didn’t disappoint.

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar challenged Warren on her support for Medicare for all. Buttigieg said Warren should support “Medicare for all who want it,” warning of the political danger in forcing millions of Americans off private health insurance plans they like. Klobuchar essentially accused Warren of being untruthful about how she'd pay for her health  care plan when Klobuchar praised Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for "being honest here"  about "where we're going to send the invoice."  Warren stuck to her guns, not budging on her plan.

Harris went after Warren for refusing to join her demand that Twitter deactivate President Trump’s account for alleged violations of its terms of service guidelines. Other candidates challenged Warren on foreign policy. Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke accused Warren of being punitive toward people on whom she wants to impose higher taxes. The hits just kept on coming.

How’d She Hold Up?

Warren had to get used to the attacks. It’s probably not fair to say she was thrown off her game, but her first responses indicated some discomfort in her new role. As the debate went on, however, Warren rebounded, taking the criticism in stride. To her credit, she never attacked her attackers in anything even suggesting a personal rebuke.

Warren will have to get used to being the hunted if she holds her spot in the polls as the race moves toward the first primaries early next year. The criteria for the next debate will likely exclude some of the 12 candidates who appeared on the stage in Ohio. If that’s the case, those remaining must find ways of distinguishing themselves from the three leaders –Warren, Sanders, and Biden. Generally, political candidates don’t knock votes off another candidate without some kind of attack. As long as Warren stays at the front of the pack, she will take hits.

What’s the Long-Term Plan?

Some political observers have suggested Warren’s end game involves a calculated move toward the center if she gets nominated. These observers say, for example, she won’t give all the details of how she plans on paying for her health care plan because she wants “wiggle room” for the general election campaign. Perhaps, this analysis goes, she’ll suggest she’s open to something less than a single payer health care system that gets rid of all private insurance, maybe a public option that builds on the Affordable Care Act. That might keep her from alienating, in particular, union members who’ve bargained for health insurance they’d hate giving up.

In post-debate spin room interviews Warren, predictably, denied having a “wiggle room” strategy. She contended she’s espousing sincerely held positions she believes serve the nation’s best interests. She can’t say anything else right now, of course, but if she gets nominated, plenty of the powers that be in the Democratic party will start pulling at her about her boldest (some would say radical) proposals. She and her team will have some hard choices if she prevails in the nomination fight and takes the stage next summer in Milwaukee as the party’s standard bearer.

Voting hasn’t even started yet, so we’d get way ahead of ourselves in anointing Warren now as the likely nominee. The flavor of the latest debate proved, however, her rivals take the possibility seriously. In going after her they showed they believe they needed to nip the possibility in the bud. It’s game on!