Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics. Read more opinion LISTEN TO ARTICLE 4:30 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email

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Members of the House judiciary committee spent Wednesday night making opening statements in a hearing about two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstructing Congress — against President Donald Trump. Was there breaking news? Nope. But it was quite interesting anyway.



The Democrats were mostly matter-of-fact. Again and again, they pounded away at the basic facts of the case — that Trump had used public policy for private gain by pressuring Ukraine to announce corruption investigations that would help him win re-election in 2020. There was very little general Trump-bashing. That served as a rejoinder to Republican claims that the whole process is all about a party that hates the president; the Democrats didn’t sound like a bunch of haters Tuesday night.

A few tried framing impeachment within their own life stories, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Pramila Jayapal, Hakeem Jeffries and Hank Johnson all gave strong efforts, although no one threatened the gold standard for impeachment oratory. The biggest disappointment for Democrats must’ve been that they failed to capture the media’s attention: None of the broadcast networks aired the prime-time session live.

As for the Republicans? They had one sort-of reasonable argument: that Democrats are rushing to finish the impeachment proceedings on an arbitrary schedule. On the charge of obstructing Congress, they also reasonably contended that Trump is within his rights to assert privileges and fight for them in the courts.

But it went rapidly downhill after that. Republicans claimed that Democrats so loathe the president that they’d impeach him regardless of the facts, which is an easy way to avoid the record in front of them but suffers from the logical flaw that if Democrats actually didn’t care about the facts, they would’ve impeached Trump long ago over the Russia scandal or emoluments or how he wears his ties.

Then there was a series of attacks on Representative Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee. Republicans are still complaining that his committee took depositions in private, even though transcripts were later released and most of the witnesses subsequently gave public testimony. And yes, they’re still complaining that Schiff paraphrased the president one time, and (a new one) that he gave a lot of documents to them before the last hearing. All this was meant to demonstrate that Schiff is the one actually obstructing Congress. I’m paraphrasing — horrors! — but it didn’t make much sense in the original either.

Perhaps the most dubious complaint, however, was that Democrats are impeaching Trump on a made-up charge, “abuse of power.” At least four Republicans repeated this claim, with the explanation that the Constitution specifies only treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors. At best, that’s ahistorical; Congress was in the process of impeaching President Richard Nixon for abuse of power (and obstruction of Congress) when he resigned. But if we take the critique to its logical conclusion, it’s alarming. To say that a president can’t abuse his office is another way of saying (as Trump did, and as Nixon notoriously did after his resignation) that presidents have essentially unlimited power that they can wield however they please.

In 1998, Democrats disputed that President Bill Clinton had obstructed justice but never questioned whether it was OK to do so. In 1974, Republicans said only that there was insufficient proof that Nixon had been involved in Watergate and the cover-up. In 2019, Republicans are mocking the entire notion of presidential abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

None of that is going to change Trump’s approval rating and none of it is likely to change any votes in the House or Senate. But it’s more than a little disturbing.

1. At the Monkey Cage, several experts on the Washington Post’s expose about the war in Afghanistan.

2. Dan Drezner is unhappy about new developments in world trade.

3. Jonathan Chait on Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

4. Aaron Blake notes that Michael Horowitz’s testimony on Wednesday knocked down a lot of the conspiracy theories that Trump and Republicans have promoted.

5 My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru argues the Supreme Court won’t be as revolutionary (or reactionary) as many liberals fear. He could be correct! But it’s hard to know.

6. And Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction on “The Mandalorian” and the political economy of anarchy.

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