The uproar over the whistle-blower investigation and its links to a conversation President Trump had with the recently-elected President of Ukraine has been entertaining, but more importantly a moral test for the electorate. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the conservative Wall Street Journal with an admirable summary:
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which his son was a director. A Ukrainian official this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son Hunter Biden.
The interactions between the president, Mr. Giuliani and Ukraine have come under scrutiny in recent days in the wake of a whistleblower complaint that a person familiar with the matter said involves the president’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the Washington Post reported centers on Ukraine, has prompted a new standoff between Congress and the executive branch.
Apologies to theocrats[1], but morality is a collective agreement about tolerable and intolerable behaviors. Does an overwhelming majority of the electorate agree that pressuring a foreign power to dig up, or even create, dirt concerning the son of one of Trump’s rivals is an intolerable abuse of Presidential power? Keep in mind the pressure isn’t merely verbal, but allegedly the threat to withhold military aid in the face of an aggressive neighbor, Russia, which has transgressed in the recent past.
That is the moral question facing the electorate, and, most importantly, the Trump base.
Moderate conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin believes this may be the rock on which Trump and the Republicans are wrecked:
Given all that, impeachment may look very different. A single article of impeachment based on an incontrovertible abuse of power would make Democrats’ job much easier. The difficultly that at-risk Republicans face in explaining to voters why they countenance such conduct begins to outweigh any downside for Democrats in pursuing impeachment, even if the eventual outcome is acquittal in the Senate.
Imagine Senate races in 2020 for Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) and others outside of deep-red America. So, Sen. Collins, you think it is perfectly fine to go to a foreign power to help sway our election outcome? Sen. Tillis, if your opponent goes to, say, China to dig up dirt on you, is that fair game?
The argument for Democrats — namely that Republicans are spineless lackeys who have violated their oaths of office — is far easier to maintain than the Republicans’ assertion that it’s nuts to remove a president who goes to a foreign power to help reelect him.
If this was a chess problem, I’d call it a pin of the Queen on the King[2]. But it’s not, because the electorate has to be persuaded, as I noted earlier, and Rubin also alludes to. Still, given enough evidence and an effective messaging campaign by the Democrats, the Republicans would be caught on the exceedingly sharp horns of a dilemma:
- Keep with team politics. This toxic cloud of a political philosophy would require continued loyalty to President Trump, thus labeling the loyalists as those whose taste for power has exceeded all tolerable pounds. I expect that those Trumpists who rode his shirt-tails to power in 2016 would continue to cling, as they tend to be second-raters with little understanding of the general electorate and proper governance.
- Turn on President Trump, voting for impeachment or conviction. Then the Trump base turns on them and they run the risk of losing their next election. Some Republicans are capable of this, and, if they have faith in their constituents, might even turn it into an election advantage. I don’t expect many to try, as they have been steeped in team politics for far too long.
Former Governor William Weld (R-MA), a primary opponent of President Trump, goes considerably further than Rubin in an interview on MSNBC, as noted by National Review:
“He’s now acknowledged that in a single phone call, right after he suspended 250 million dollars of military aid to Ukraine, he called up the president of Ukraine and pressed him eight times to investigate Joe Biden, who the president thinks is going to be running against him,” Weld continued. “Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election. It couldn’t be clearer, and that’s not just undermining democratic institutions. That is treason. It’s treason and pure and simple and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death.”
It’s an interesting political gambit for a candidate for the Republican nomination going against an incumbent whose party approval rating is in the 80+% range. On the one hand, I think he’s trying to shock the Republicans into re-evaluating President Trump by being a Republican who has publicly evaluated him and found him wanting.
On the other hand, he runs the risk of permanently alienating himself from the huge majority of the Republican party, as he rejects a man – a Republican President – and suggests may have committed such a horrendous crime that he should be put to death. This may not sit well with the Republican Party.
Conservative David French:
Those words do not mean that Joe and Hunter Biden’s conduct in Ukraine was proper. The Bidens should answer questions about that conduct. And of course Trump could tweet about their conflicts of interest every hour of every day, if he chose. But there is a vast difference between campaigning for office by calling attention to your potential rival’s known controversies and utilizing the official duties and powers of the presidency to push for foreign investigations. How easy would it be for a nation desperate for American aid to make a “finding” of wrongdoing that assists the very man who controls the receipt of vital military aid?
One of the most troubling aspects of the Mueller report was the plain evidence that key members of the Trump team were willing and even eager to receive foreign help — even from a geopolitical rival — in the campaign against Hillary Clinton. The reports so far regarding Ukraine raise the troubling possibility of foreign engagement that’s a step beyond even cooperation. It raises the possibility of foreign engagement based on express or implied coercion.
There’s a double concern here. First — and most obviously — presidential pressure on foreign allies can corrupt the American political process in numerous, obvious ways. But it can also corrupt American diplomacy, conflating the American national interest with the president’s self-interest. Military aid decisions should be made based on America’s geostrategic interests, not on foreign cooperation with a president’s reelection campaign.
The priorities now are clear. The relevant congressional committees should have prompt access to the whistleblower complaint and to the transcript of the call with Zelensky. They should also investigate Giuliani’s contacts with Ukraine. The president should enjoy great latitude in his conversations with foreign leaders, and they should ordinarily enjoy a degree of privilege from public discovery, but here the president’s lawyer and the president himself have raised the possibility that a red line has been crossed.
Former Governor John Kasich (R-OH), a 2016 Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination, via CNN cries out for the law to be followed:
John Kasich calls out GOP for not pressuring President Trump to hand over the whistleblower complaint to the House Intel Committee and says he’s very concerned. “If we don’t deal with this we become like a banana republic and where are the Republicans? "What are they — hiding?” pic.twitter.com/WevF7yXZEk
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) September 23, 2019
And how is the Republican base thinking? Kevin Drum has an informal interview with one of them:
I had an, um, spirited discussion about political matters with a friend this morning, and among other things he disagreed with my considered assessment that Ukrainegate, if true, represented “Nixonian levels of corruption.” In fact, he saw nothing wrong with it at all. It was just ordinary politics and he figured that presidents ask foreign leaders for favors like this all the time. Oh, and why did Joe Biden want to get rid of that prosecutor, anyway?
What’s more, he said, this wasn’t nearly as bad as all the stuff Hillary did. Nor was it as bad as Obama promising “more flexibility” to the Russians on a hot mic. It was just more Democratic witch huntery, like Mueller all over again, who proved that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice because you can only obstruct criminal investigations, not counterintelligence inquiries.
I wasn’t even really mad about all this. Just depressed. This is what a big chunk of ordinary conservativedom thinks, and nothing is going to change it.
It’s a mistake to allow the what-about-isms to occur, because we’re not here to compare, Hillary was not President, and the oversight functions the Republicans supposedly exercised over the Obama never raised a red flag about the Ukraine situation, probably because there was nothing to flag.
But, most importantly, we do not make judgments based on the alleged actions of political rivals. We make judgments based on the strictures laid down in the Constitution.
In general, I tend to agree with Benjamin Wittes that Congress cannot permit witnesses to thumb their noses at oversight committees, and he discusses some approaches to the problem here. But the real problem is the lack of conscience that appears to be an attribute of many of these people. I don’t know if they were born that way, if they’re so convinced of the evil of the Democrats, or if they’re just so caught up in the game that it doesn’t occur to them that their activities in the service of winning will damage the Nation, perhaps irreparably.
