Trump has asked a foreign power to dig up dirt on a major political rival. This is an impeachable offense.
Come
back in time with me. In late May 1787, when 55 delegates gathered in
Philadelphia to begin debate over a new Constitution, everyone knew the
first person to be president would be the man who presided over that
gathering: George Washington. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “The first
man put at the helm will be a good one,” but “Nobody knows what sort may
come afterwards.”
Initially, some of the delegates didn’t want
to include impeachment in the Constitution, arguing that if a president
was bad he’d be voted out at the next election. But what if the
president was so bad that the country couldn’t wait until the next
election? Which is why Franklin half-joked that anyone who wished to be
president should support an impeachment clause because the alternative
was assassination.
So they agreed that Congress should have the
power to impeach a president — but on what grounds? The initial
impeachment clause borrowed from established concepts in English law and
state constitutions, allowing impeachment for “maladministration” —
basically incompetence, akin to a vote of no confidence.
James
Madison and others argued this was too vague a standard. They changed it
to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
But what did this mean?
One
of the biggest fears of the founding fathers was that the new nation
might fall under the sway of foreign powers. That’s what had happened in
Europe over the years, where one nation or another had fallen prey to
bribes, treaties and ill-advised royal marriages from other nations.
So
those who gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution included a
number of provisions to guard against foreign intrusion in American
democracy. One was the emoluments clause, barring international payments
or gifts to a president or other federal elected official. The framers
of the Constitution worried that without this provision, a president
might be bribed by a foreign power to betray America.
The delegates to the Convention were also concerned that a foreign power might influence the outcome of an election.
They
wanted to protect the new United States from what Alexander Hamilton
called the “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in
our councils.“ Or as James Madison put it, protect the new country from a
president who’d “betray his trust to foreign powers.” Gouverneur Morris
of Pennsylvania, who initially had opposed including an impeachment
clause, agreed to include it in order to avoid “the danger of seeing the
first Magistrate in foreign pay.”
During the Virginia ratifying
convention, Edmund Randolph explicitly connected impeachment to foreign
money, saying that a president “may be impeached” if discovered
“receiving emoluments [help] from foreign powers.” George Washington, in
his farewell address, warned of “the insidious wiles of foreign
influence.”
You don’t have to be a so-called “originalist,”
interpreting the Constitution according to what the founders were trying
to do at the time, in order to see how dangerous it is to allow a
president to seek help in an election from a foreign power.
If
a president can invite a foreign power to influence the outcome of an
election, there’s no limit to how far foreign powers might go to curry
favor with a president by helping to take down his rivals. That would be
the end of democracy as we know it.
Now, fast forward 232 years from that Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to Donald Trump.
It’s
not just the official summary of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian
president Zelensky in which after telling Zelensky how good America has
been to Ukraine, Trump asks for “a favor, though” and then explicitly
asks Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, one of Trump’s most likely
opponents in the 2020 election.
Trump’s entire presidency has
been shadowed by questions of foreign interference favoring him.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented extensive
contacts between Trump’s associates and Russian figures — concluding
that the Kremlin sought specifically to help Trump get elected, and that
Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s help.
Trump at one
point in the 2016 election campaign even publicly called on Russia to
find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and within hours Russian agents
sought to do just that by trying to break into her computer servers.
More recently, he openly called on China’s help, saying before cameras “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”
This is an impeachable offense, according to the framers of the Constitution. Trump did it.
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