IS OUR PRESIDENT A POOR DELEGATOR?

Now that the first impeachment trial is finished, what happened?

National Review's editors suggest that an impeachable offense ought be Something Serious.

Senate Republicans, by and large, have reached an unspoken consensus about President Trump and Ukraine. He should not have put a temporary freeze on congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine, should not have dabbled with using the aid to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden or a nutty theory about Ukrainian hacking during the 2016 election, and should not have kept defending his “perfect call” as such. At the same time, his conduct does not merit his removal from office — especially since voters will get to pass judgment on that conduct in a few months.

It’s a reasonable position, and it’s the case that Republicans ought to make in public. They are inhibited from doing so by the president’s obstinacy. Instead of sticking to the most defensible case for a Senate acquittal of Trump, Republicans from the president on down are making arguments that range from the implausible to the embarrassing.

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff appears to concur.

Trump’s attorneys have argued that Trump didn’t do anything wrong by linking U.S. aid to Ukraine (for a time) with an investigation of the Bidens. They say that the Bidens acted corruptly, and that their corruption needed to be investigated. In this view of things, Trump was promoting the national interest in fighting corruption, rather than trying to promote his own political fortunes.

I find this argument unpersuasive for two related reasons. First, to say that the Bidens needed to be investigated is not to say that Ukraine needed to investigate them. If Joe Biden committed an offense by using the threat of an aid cutoff to advance his family’s economic interests, that’s a matter for the U.S. to investigate — just as the allegation that Trump used the same threat to advance his political interests was a matter for the U.S. to investigate (though not via impeachment).

Perhaps an illustration will help.

First, I have trouble getting too exercised over favors for favors, even if you try to make it sound scary by rendering the action in Latin.  "Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of."  Yes, that's Adam Smith, and he's writing about commerce, and yet, isn't an exchange of favors for favors the essence of human interaction?  Only an intellectual, or a politician, might believe that exchanges of favors are evil per se.

Former plain-speaking Secretary of Education and current Senator from Tennessee Lamar Alexander might have gotten to the heart of the matter.  Here's another National Review editorial.

Alexander expressed the correct view on the underlying matter — one we have been urging Republicans to publicly adopt since impeachment first got off the ground.

The Tennessee Republican said that it has been amply established that Donald Trump used a hold on defense aid to pressure the Ukrainians to undertake the investigations that he wanted, and that this was, as he mildly put it, inappropriate. But this misconduct, he argued, doesn’t rise to the level of the high crimes and misdemeanors required to remove a president from office. If the Senate were to do so anyway, it would further envenom the nation’s partisan divide. Besides, there is a national election looming where the public itself can decide whether Trump should stay in office or not.

Since we already know the core of what happened, Alexander explained, there was no need to hear from additional witnesses in the Senate trial.

The senator's public statement extends that argument.

It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.

The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.

The Senate has spent nine long days considering this ‘mountain’ of evidence, the arguments of the House managers and the president’s lawyers, their answers to senators’ questions and the House record. Even if the House charges were true, they do not meet the Constitution’s ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors’ standard for an impeachable offense.

The framers believed that there should never, ever be a partisan impeachment. That is why the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate for conviction. Yet not one House Republican voted for these articles. If this shallow, hurried and wholly partisan impeachment were to succeed, it would rip the country apart, pouring gasoline on the fire of cultural divisions that already exist. It would create the weapon of perpetual impeachment to be used against future presidents whenever the House of Representatives is of a different political party.

Note, dear reader, the weaseliness of "inappropriate." If you disapprove of somebody farting at dinner or giggling at a funeral, you can say "inappropriate." If you disapprove of a snide remark at a faculty meeting, you can say "inappropriate."  When your partner ruffs your ace, you can say "inappropriate."  If Houston Astro batters hear a lot of chin music this season, the broadcasters can say "inappropriate."

In a Meet the Press session, the senator gave the game away.

CHUCK TODD: Does it wear on you, though, that one of the – I mean -- one of the foundational reasons, ways that the framers wrote the Constitution was almost fear of foreign interference?

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER: That's true.

CHUCK TODD: So, and here it is.

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER: Well, if you hooked up with Ukraine to wage war on the United States, as the first senator from Tennessee did, you could be expelled. But this wasn't that. This was the kind -- what the president should have done was, if he was upset about Joe Biden and his son and what they were doing in Ukraine, he should have called the Attorney General and told him that and let the Attorney General handle it the way they always handle cases that involve public figures.

CHUCK TODD: And why do you think he didn't do that?

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER: Maybe he didn't know to do it.

Put another way, there are established (shall we say appropriate?) ways in which a president can get the same thing accomplished (a review of foreign corruption and a suspension of foreign aid) without provoking an impeachment inquiry.

As Meet the Press sessions go, this one wasn't too bad.  Chuck Todd dialed back his usual truculent chipmunk persona for this Republican.  The show, in common with a lot of businesses these days, doesn't present everything over the air or in print.  The full interview is still available online, and there are no reverses or other surprises in there.  (I'm less inclined to embed video from NBC, as they raise hell with my ad-blocker.  Shouldn't they be grateful for me finding them additional eyeballs?)