David Corn: With This Impeachment, Trump Is Getting Off Easy

[fleur-de-lisa]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/with-this-impeachment-trump-is-getting-off-easy/

On Friday morning, the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against the 45th president of the United States. In the historic move, Trump was cited for abusing his office and obstructing Congress’ investigation of that abuse. The abuse was a narrow matter: Trump’s effort to muscle the Ukrainian president into initiating public investigations that would produce dirt on political rival Joe Biden and yield information to support a crazy and debunked conspiracy theory that holds Russia did not hack the 2016 election and that Ukraine was somehow involved in the cyber-assault on Democrats. The obstruction was Trump’s blocking of congressional requests for witnesses and documents related to the Ukraine caper.

Two weeks of hearings conducted by the House Intelligence Committee presented a strong case that Trump leveraged official actions—a phone call or meeting with the Ukrainian leader and releasing $391 million in military assistance to Kyiv—to pressure the Ukrainian government to take action for Trump’s personal political benefit. Trump was squeezing Ukraine in an underhanded fashion to influence the 2020 election in his favor. The Democrats have argued, with justification, that this conduct was impeachable, for it showed Trump was exploiting his presidential power to cheat and to undermine the foundation of American democracy: the electoral process. Yet the medium-impeachment strategy the Democrats have embraced does not convey the full measure of Trump’s crimes against the Constitution, and it could even distract from the full damage he has done to the republic.

There is no question that this impeachment vote is a serious indictment of Trump, and it is no secret that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders, after rebuffing calls from progressive Democrats and the Twitterish grassroots for Trump’s impeachment, settled on the Ukraine scandal as a narrow and well-defined basis for an impeachment, believing that this affair could be easily explained to the American public and quickly investigated. They calculated that many voters would not welcome a long and drawn-out impeachment inquiry that could be perceived as a nasty partisan mudwrestling match that prevents Congress from addressing vital legislative matters. And the Dems were spooked by the Trump-Russia scandal. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his subsequent lackluster congressional appearance this spring had not caused the decisive change in public opinion that some Democrats expected. And consultants for the party, prior to the midterm elections, had cautioned Democrats that the public generally was not engaged by the Russia matter and that candidates should not dwell on the topic.

So Ukraine it was. Following the release of the quasi-transcript of Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky—in which he told the Ukrainian president that in return for Javelin anti-tank missiles Zelensky would have do him the “favor” of launching these political investigations—Pelosi and her lieutenants decided they no longer had a choice on impeachment. And they believed it could be handled as sort of a spin-off that focused only on this limited slice of Trump’s misconduct. But nothing with Trump is neat. Or simple.

much more at link.

[dem4decades]

1. He's right. Call cohen as a witness, individual one should pay.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. TrumPutin has and will continue to try to rig elections -- impeachment is necessary