An American Tragedy

Unless a miracle happens the Senate will not convict Individual-1 of the charges the House has brought against him and remove him from office. The Senate vote is scheduled for next Wednesday. Unless a miracle happens it will be a strict party line vote--53-47 for acquittal. It's easy to look at that vote and see both sides acting for their political advantage rather than on the basis of the facts and the law. Strict party line votes like this one tell us nothing about what's right. To get to what's right we have to look at the facts and, in case of an impeachment at least, the law behind the vote. When we do that in the case of Individual-1's impeachment we find that both the facts and the law lead to only one defensible conclusion. Individual-1 is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and must be removed from office. He solicited and was prepared to accept a violation of campaign finance law by getting Ukraine to give him something of value for his reelection campaign. In that effort he used nongovernmental people--Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and others--and worked outside normal, legal diplomatic channels. He forced a career foreign service officer serving as ambassador to Ukraine out of her post not because of any legitimate policy issue but because he believed she hampered his solicitation of that illegal aid. He violated the law on impounding funds lawfully appropriated by Congress.. He violated his oath of office and did everything he could to hamper Congress' investigation into his wrongdoing. None of these facts is in dispute. They are what he did. The consensus of constitutional scholars is that impeachment does not require a violation of the law, although of course we have violations of the law here. All of that adds up to only one thing: Congress must convict Individual-1 of the charges the House has brought against him and remove him from office. That it won't is one of the great tragedies in the history of American politics.