This best argument the Republicans on the Judicary Committee could muster against continuing the Impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump Nine minutes long followed by my thoughts:
The first three law professors to speak made strong arguments to proceed with a House indictment of the President. The lone GOP witness, Johnathan Turley, managed to make me second guess the Impeachment because I agreed with his assessment that it is divisive. Then, I checked his testimony in the Clinton impeachment which was alluded to. Did he also oppose that impeachment for being divisive? Nope! He didn’t. In the Clinton hearings he made the same arguments as the three pro-Trump impeachment professors did today. If ever there was a scholar who put himself in the cross hairs of an hypocrisy assault it is Professor Turley. He tried to sound impartial by explaining that he didn’t vote for Trump.
Well, I wonder if he bothered to explain in the Clinton impeachment who he voted for. However he voted he jumped on Bill (I DIDN’T SLEEP WITH THAT WOMAN) Clinton. Had Bill made the claim only in public he’d have gotten away with it just like he got away with saying that he “didn’t inhale.” After all he didn’t “sleep” with Monica. He just let her spill some of his semen on her blue dress. But Bill was caught lying about Monica to a grand jury about his having been intimate with her. Donald Trump’s chief claim to innocence is then that he has never lied to a grand jury. The President lies like a rug every day tweet by tweet…..BUT NOT BEFORE A GRAND JURY. Except that maybe he did. He infamously was excused from testifying because he attorneys aren’t dumb. They know Donald Trump can’t open his mouth without lying no matter if the world is listening with jaws falling to the floor. So he was allowed to have heavily edited (by his lawyers) written testimony submitted in the Mueller probe. Who gets that kind of treatment? Donald Trump does….I guess on the same theory that no one can prosecute a President for committing crimes like the infamous fifth avenue shooting he bragged he could get away with. But there are hints that just like Bill Clinton the President lied to a Grand Jury even in his heavily edited testimony. That would be perjury….the same “high crime and misdemeanor” that Terley thought should cost Clinton the presidency.
Terley championed the book Profiles in Courage in his testimony. As an eighth grader I read, and was deeply moved by JFK’s book. I was proud of my state’s Republican Senator Ross for not voting to Impeach Andrew Johnson. This was Terley’s chief defense – the cheapening of Impeachment. Except that it ignores the threats outlined by his three predecessors. What happens if America recoils at Donald Trump’s massive abuse of power? Will our Congress ever have the courage to defend the Constitution’s deliberate separation of powers in the future? One twitter critic of Terley answered the professor’s question about whether a future Democratic President might be impeached because of a mob-like public fury. The critic’s answered the same way I would have. If a Democratic president tries to subvert our democracy and our elections he should be impeached forthwith.
I’m not worried about the Republican Senators craven support of a President they loathe and fear. Let them live with footnotes in their biographies explaining that they were exactly what America’s voters have come to expect from our elected leaders – gutless wonders.
