“It’s as plain a case of abuse of power as one can easily imagine”
seeks to ground the talk about removing the president from office in centuries of history and practice.
The House has opened an impeachment inquiry into president Trump’s behavior. What has Trump done that places him at peril for being removed from office? So they turned to “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The framers were saying people should be impeachable for roughly the same kind of things that the British were impeached for in the past. And they were putting an open-ended term into the Constitution, because human ingenuity doesn’t extend to an absolutely comprehensive list of all the ways in which someone in the future, an official, might misuse authority.
The other one, of course, that everyone’s talking about has to do with the second power, foreign policy matters — also military. The president is the commander-in-chief and he is the principal diplomat. And both of those authorities are given to him expressly or impliedly by the Constitution. But what he’s saying to the president of this other country is: We provide a lot of aid to you, some of it military, some of it diplomatic support.
What happened between Trump and Ukraine lacked any justification that it was in America’s national interest. It was just about. It was just about Trump’s personal obsession about his need to get dirt on his enemies. There was no other policy purpose that was served there. It was not only the phone call. This needs to be investigated further, but it certainly appears that $400 million of potential aid was stalled for reasons that nobody has been able to explain.
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