Why didn’t Republicans try harder to defend Trump?

By Jonathan Bernstein

THE HOUSE of Representatives has just impeached a United States president for the third time. I’ve talked about the politics of it before and will do so again as the action moves to the Senate. For now, I’ll stick with the substance of what happened on Wednesday.

Democrats brought a straightforward case to the House floor: In a phone call, President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to do things for Trump’s private political benefit, an appeal that was part of a longer-term strategy that included publicly asking Ukraine and China to investigate his political rival. The case rested on the testimony of a number of witnesses and various documents and other evidence. The president’s plan was upended only when it was discovered.

The Democrats on Wednesday also indulged in verbiage about how solemn and important the occasion was, and spent hardly any time on the second article of impeachment, the one about obstruction of Congress. But throughout the process, from the Intelligence Committee’s work to the Judiciary Committee’s deliberation and then to the vote on the House floor, they made a simple and compelling case that the president’s actions were sufficiently improper so that impeachment and removal were the only reasonable responses.

By contrast, the Republican case against impeachment was… well, they threw a bunch of stuff against the wall. Their strongest arguments were that Democrats were rushing the process and were willing to impeach a president in a party-line vote after previously speaking against doing so.*

Democrats certainly were rushing things. They said they had to act urgently because Trump and his people were still conspiring to encourage foreign involvement in the 2020 election. That argument, always reasonable, became stronger when Rudy Giuliani, representing the president, traveled to Ukraine in the last several days and came back with new smears against former Vice-President Joe Biden. The Democrats also pointed out that Trump has continued to claim that his phone conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect,” implying that he would do exactly the same again.

As for the Republicans’ point that the House majority was conducting a partisan impeachment, with no Republicans except for the Republican-turned-independent Justin Amash of Michigan voting “yes” on either of the two articles, they are correct that it is hardly ideal. Yet their position that Trump’s actions were blameless left Democrats with little choice.

Republicans have not argued for a lesser reaction, such as a censure. They have not joined Democrats in pressing the White House to cooperate with legitimate oversight investigations, including this one.

Nor have they urged the president to reform himself and his administration, as Republicans did during the Iran-contra scandal in 1986-1987. Back then, the GOP members of Congress rallied around President Ronald Reagan only after he took steps to avoid a repetition of the White House wrongdoing and took responsibility for what happened. Democrats who seek a bipartisan response have no partners.

Those two Republican arguments are relatively strong compared with the defense they spent most of their time on during the House session on Wednesday. The bulk of their case was that impeachment must be wrong now because some Democrats have always wanted to impeach Trump — not for anything he has done, they said, but because they hate him.

That point ignored the fact that early in the administration, Democrats were acting in response to specific Trump actions, not on their general dislike for him. If, as Republicans said, Democrats were determined to impeach Trump regardless of the evidence, then it can’t also be true that they didn’t impeach him over the Russia scandal because the evidence didn’t work out for them. If, on the other hand, they were determined to impeach as soon as the facts were on their side? Well, that’s exactly what Congress should be doing.

Republicans also claimed there is no direct evidence and only hearsay for the allegations. But the call record is direct evidence. They repeated a series of out-of-context quotes and flat-out falsehoods while mischaracterizing impeachment itself.

For Republicans, impeachment is a coup, a reversal of the 2016 election, and an insult to Trump’s voters and therefore improper. Republican Whip Steve Scalise even claimed that Democrats were doing this because they hate every Trump voter.

Really? But impeachment isn’t anything like a coup. It does not reverse the 2016 election. And if it was true that impeachment is illegitimate because it insults those who voted for the president, then impeachment followed by Senate conviction wouldn’t exist at all, since it necessarily removes the voters’ choice (even if this particular president was elected without a plurality of the votes, let alone a majority).

We also heard a number of unconvincing procedural objections. Republicans are still protesting the depositions that were originally given in secret, even though the transcripts were released, and most witnesses were later examined in public. Then there is the complaint that the Democrats didn’t call witnesses the GOP minority wanted to hear from. But the White House, not House Democrats, blocked the key witnesses we haven’t heard from. The ones the House Democrats blocked had nothing to do with the case against Trump; they were selected by Republicans to put Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi or anyone except Trump on trial.

So we’re on to the Senate. Even if they feel they don’t have to even bother, perhaps members of Trump’s defense team will try to make some stronger case there.

* They also knocked Democrats for polling about impeachment, but they got the story wrong. Democrats didn’t change what they charged the president with because of polls and focus groups; they changed how they talked about it. That’s perhaps deserving of ridicule, but it’s irrelevant to whether the case Democrats are making is reasonable or not.