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.   

TRUMP’S TRUE BELIEVERS: WHAT THEY THINK AND WHY THEY WON’T CHANGE

As the impeachment story moves forward, evolving by the hour, we find the arguments offered by President Trump’s defenders increasingly outlandish, less and less effective but incredibly interesting. Polls show support for impeachment and conviction

growing in the wake of Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a whistleblower complaint that produced Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that the House of Representatives had, in fact, begun an

impeachment inquiry. As the calendar turned to October, half the respondents in some polls favored Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. With the pressure ramping up, the number of Americans favoring impeachment and conviction will likely increase, not diminish.

Trump’s defenders kept spinning, despite being confronted by reporters, talk show hosts, and others who demonstrated their infidelity to the facts and the illogic of their conclusions. With the narrative about Trump’s actual conduct seemingly so clear, the interesting part of the story for us became how Trump and his people approached defending the indefensible.     

Three Lines of Attack

Though Trump’s backers offered a range of reasons why Congress shouldn’t impeach him, their main arguments fell into three broad categories: (1) Joe Biden did it too; (2) what Trump did was okay; and (3) attacks on the whistleblower who started all this with a complaint under established whistleblower procedures. The facts support none of these approaches to Trump's defense.

Several media organizations looked into the Biden-did-it-too claim and all turned up nothing. No evidence exists the former vice president improperly

used his office while promoting Obama administration policy. Along with European leaders, Biden advocated the ouster of a prosecutor because of his failures in investigating corruption in that former Soviet  republic. Additionally, no evidence surfaced that Biden exerted inappropriate influence related to the board position his son held with a Ukrainian company.

No basis exists for declaring the substance of Trump’s call to his Ukrainian counterpart

Phone transcript of Trump/Ukrainian call 

acceptable. Having already frozen U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, Trump asked for two “favors”:  (1) help with a probe into the origins of the Mueller  investigation and (2) finding dirt on Biden, the obvious conclusion being the

release of funds dependent on performing the favors. Anybody reading the White House-released notes of Trump’s call who won’t acknowledge those facts illustrates the old adage about no one being blinder than one who will not see.

Trump and his allies have railed against the whistle-blower, demanding the person’s identity, clearly a violation of U.S. law. This nation has had – for obvious reasons – laws protecting whistle-blowers since the 1700s. Now is not the time for abrogating those laws.

Why They Persist

We get Trump’s self-preservation instinct, hence his own defense of his actions and his personal strikes at Biden and the whistle-blower. That’s what we’d expect. Understanding why Republican members of Congress stay with Trump will become increasingly difficult as more information comes out and as public support for impeachment grows. Richard Nixon didn’t resign until his approval rating fell to about 25 per cent, putting Republican members of Congress in the position of choosing between Nixon and their own political survival. They chose at least trying to save their own necks, though the massive GOP losses in the 1974 mid-terms suggest only modest success in that endeavor.

What we find really intriguing is trying to figure out why ordinary Americans buy into

arguing on Trump’s behalf. In our discussions, we’ve suggested a number of reasons, most of them unflattering and we realize that’s not always fair and perhaps not enlightening either. Trump has found something in a swath of the American nation that allows him unwavering support from a significant part of the voting public.

One can debate the size of that swath, while recognizing its importance. Woodson, for

example, thinks its 40-45 per cent.  Rob thinks the rabid Trump base lies somewhere in the low 30s, with the rest of his approval rating coming from committed, baseline

Republicans and people who support some of his policies but won’t man the barricades for him. Henry thinks it falls somewhere in between. Since we usually

occupy space on the other side of the political divide, we need to understand the why of this.

Some of this, in all likelihood, resides in devotion to Trump’s positions on social issues 

like abortion and gay rights. We know Trump supporters so invested in assuring Trump’s pursuit of an anti-abortion, anti-gay judiciary, they cannot break with him for any reason.

For others, we think immigration produces the same dedication. Trump’s determination

to build a wall (or his latest scheme, construction of a moat with snakes and alligators) on the south-
ern border and his detention policies regarding immigrants generate so much popularity among some voters, they stick with him despite whatever bad act he’s committed.

Such explanations probably account for the attitudes of many Trump defenders and they aren’t changing. We think there are other  reasons we have not, and perhaps cannot, tease out, given our commitment to rules of reason and fact-based analysis. We can’t read documents like the notes of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelensky and reach conclusions the facts laid out in that document don’t support.  

We keep searching. As long as Trump occupies the White House, understanding the why of the Trump phenomena will remain an important job for all who care about our politics and our democracy. Any ideas?