By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
The Democrats believe that the 2020 election is too
important to be left to the voters.
It’s obvious that President Donald Trump withheld defense
aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to commit to the investigations that
he wanted, an improper use of his power that should rightly be the focus of
congressional investigation and hearings.
Where the Democrats have gotten tangled up is trying to
find a justification that supports the enormous weight of impeaching and
removing a president for the first time in our history.
They’ve cycled through different arguments. First,
Trump’s offense was said to be a quid pro quo, a phrase cast aside for
supposedly being too Latin for the public to understand; then it was bribery,
which has lost ground lately, presumably because of the inherent implausibility
of the charge; now, the emphasis is on Trump’s invitation to the Ukrainians to
“meddle” and “interfere” in our elections.
This is posited to be an ongoing threat. Nancy Pelosi
said in her statement calling on the House to draft articles of impeachment:
“Our democracy is what is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to
act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own
benefit. The president has engaged in abuse of power undermining our national
security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.”
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler said on Meet
the Press last weekend that Trump has to be impeached “for posing the
considerable risk that he poses to the next election.” Asked if he thinks the
2020 election will be on the up and up, he said: “I don’t know. The president,
based on his past performance, will do everything he can to make it not a fair
election.”
The gravamen of this case is that the election is too
crucial to allow the incumbent president of the United States, who is leading
in key battleground states and has some significant chance of winning, to run.
In fact, the integrity of the election is so at risk that the U.S. Senate
should keep the public from rendering a judgment on Donald Trump’s first term,
or deciding between him and, say, his nemesis Joe Biden.
Of course, it’s possible to imagine a circumstance where
a president would indeed present such a grave risk to our elections that he’d
have to be removed. This is a reason that we have the impeachment process in
the first place. But what’s the real harm that Trump’s foolhardy Ukraine
adventure presented?
Let’s say that Ukraine had, in response to Trump
pressure, actually announced an investigation into Burisma, a shady company
that had in the past been under investigation. What would have happened? Would
Joe Biden have been forced from the race? His numbers collapsed in Nevada and
South Carolina, his best early states? His numbers changed anywhere?
No, it’s not even clear that there would have been any
additional domestic political scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s lucrative arrangement
with Burisma, an issue that is dogging the former vice president on the
campaign trail anyway because his son’s payday was so blatantly inappropriate.
The bottom line is that after tsk-tsking Trump for
refusing to say in advance that he’d accept the outcome of the 2016 election,
Democrats have steadfastly refused to truly accept the 2016 result (allegedly
the work of the Russians) and now are signaling they won’t accept next year’s
election either, should they lose again.
Given their druthers, Trump wouldn’t be an option for the
voters. They are rushing their impeachment, in part, because they know that as
November 2020 approaches, it becomes steadily less tenable to portray the man
who wants to run in an election as the threat to democracy and the people who
want to stop him as its champions.
With every day that passes, the Democrats risk creating
the perception that they themselves are a threat to the 2020 election.
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