Justice Department Transcript Of The Spicy Conversation
Mr. Silton's going to have a field day with this one, if not on the blog, then definitely during class. Prepare yourself. Buckle down. This one's spicy.
This story has been utterly eclipsing the news cycle, by the way. It's been insane. Here's the long and short of it.
On July 25th, President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and, as you can read in the Justice Department Transcript of the call, unsubtly prodded him to contact Rudy Giuliani and investigate a potential scandal involving Joe Biden and his son. No papers were signed, but Zelensky verbally agreed. Additionally, a week before this conversation, President Trump ordered the freezing of hundreds of millions of dollars of financial aid to Ukraine (funding for the purpose of fending off Russia). There is currently no solid evidence that these two events are linked.
On August 12th, an anonymous whistleblower filed a complaint to the intelligence community. The exact contents of this complaint are still unknown but its general gist of a shady promise over the phone with a foreign leader got out on the 19th of September.
Since then, a transcript of the conversation has been released by the Justice Department, Rudy Giuliani has been on television stating that it's okay for the President to withhold aid in exchange for investigating Biden, Trump has claimed there was no "quid pro quo" in his call and the aid was withheld due to corruption in Ukraine, and Nancy Pelosi, Democratic speaker of the house, has announced an impeachment inquiry (basically an investigation into the events in question). The House seems to have a majority in favor of impeachment even before the inquiry has run its course. The Senate, currently Republican controlled, has had a number of members express their disapproval of the impeachment. Remember that impeachment requires a majority vote from the House, and then the actual trial requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
(There's Opinion coming up, so here's the disclaimer: I have bias.)
The way I see it, unless some key evidence is revealed in the Impeachment Inquiry beyond these allegations, Trump, even if voted to trial by the House with the knowledge we have now, will not be convicted. The Senate is on his side, and, ultimately, there is no solid evidence that this conversation was actually an abuse of aid money, and we have no evidence of actual Ukrainian interference beyond verbal assent. Do I think his actions so far are incredibly suspect and incriminating? Absolutely. Do I think the Dems in the House should gather some more solid evidence before voting to impeach? Also absolutely. Well, I mean, that's what the Impeachment Inquiry is for. The Senate will need more convincing for a two-thirds vote to convict the President of their party, and a House impeachment vote without a Senate conviction would only fuel the "witch hunt" narrative.
It's strange how my opinion on the matter has been based on partisan control of the House and Senate, isn't it? Congress is bicameral, and it's split like this in such a partisan political culture, and the President is somebody like Donald Trump who breaks political conventions left and right and leaves lawmakers scratching their heads like, "Wait, was that legal?" When the situation is like this, it's hard not to think in donkeys and elephants.
Questions:
1. Has this potential impeachment become an overly partisan issue? If so, what does that mean for the state of America's political culture and the American governmental system? If not, why not?
2. If President Trump's behavior here goes without conviction, what kind of precedent would that set for American government in the future?
3. CSMonitor puts a lot of weight on how this problem looks to the voter, how certain spins of these events can be "easily grasped" by the public, and how those in favor of impeachment are framing the conflict in a way that is "easier for voters to understand." How does public opinion affect the outcome of this debacle? How do voters affect it?
Extra. How spicy is this conflict on a scale of ten out of ten to two thousand out of ten?
4 comments:
Thanks for this fantastic post, Janet. I wanted to correct one small thing: President Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky was on July 25, not June 25.
With respect to your first question, it seems like everything nowadays is an overly partisan issue. However, I read Mr. Silton's NY Times article about the process of impeachment, and it quoted one of Hamilton's Federalist Papers, which claimed that impeachable crimes "are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL." In other words, impeachment doesn't guarantee the same objectivity that a normal trial does. Knowing this and being accustomed to way our parties treat each other, it's not really surprising that the potential impeachment is a heavily partisan issue so far.
But maybe the framers of the Constitution were wrong in their design of the impeachment process. Was it really right for them to create a special type of social crime reserved for only the President to commit?
I agree with Janet that even with HOR calling for impeachment, there is little if any guarantee that Trump will actually get impeached. There will have to be extremely incriminating evidence for Trump's own party to go against him within the Senate. Should this trial go without conviction, this essentially sets the precedent that the checks and balances of the federal government are no longer functioning appropriately. If a president that committed a crime can get away with their actions, obviously there no longer are equal powers within the government. The HOR and Senate are expected to be able to take a president to trial and impeach if approved, but if the 2/3 of either party are completely biased towards the criminal, no justice will be made. I personally think that all members of Congress will have to tread lightly with the case, or they will be viewed as heavily biased.
!!!!!! Thank you for pointing out my mistake! I'll go fix it right away. I was slightly *cough* hysterical at the time of posting.
That's an interesting lens to view the process through actually. We Americans tend to favor a justice system that leans towards objective judgment; to think this process was designed for crimes outside the violation of ordinary criminal statutes is indeed "peculiar." However, I do think that holding the President of the country at a higher standard than a regular citizen is not altogether unreasonable. The head of the Executive Branch is simultaneously a massively influential governmental body and a figurehead for the administration and the country at large. If that seat was able to commit massive betrayals of public trust with impunity simply due to a lack of violation of an ordinary criminal statute, American government would be in a dire situation indeed.
Personally I think that the HOR ought to begin impeachment proceedings on the President, for his misuse of power is evident in the transcript of his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I understand that the argument saying that if it were any other president impeachment proceedings would already be going on is outdated, for Trump has never acted nor been treated as any other president. However, using the power of the presidency to even allude to influencing a foreign investigation towards a political rival should not be brushed under the mat of unprecedented actions Trump has done. Action by congress must be taken in order to set the precedent that such political moves are not permitted by any president, current or future. Although it is highly unlikely that the Republican controlled Senate will vote to impeach the President out of office, Democrats should persist in their moves for impeachments in order to set such precedent. However, they must be strategic to avoid the partisan fiasco of the Clinton impeachment in the 90's, for according to a new CNN poll when asked "why do most Democrats in Congress support impeachment of Donald Trump?" 70% of Republicans answered with "Out to get Trump at all costs," revealing a partisan divide. The only way Democrats can gain credibility is through bipartisanship.
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/09/30/rel11a.-.impeachment.pdf
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