U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner either thinks it’s OK for a president to pressure a foreign government to investigate a U.S. citizen for personal and political gain or he’s too afraid to criticize this president for doing just that.

We’re not sure which is worse.

Gardner failed to address the issue on the floor of Congress while he was explaining to the public his decision to acquit the president on that very question. In subsequent media interviews where he was asked the question directly, he did the trademark Gardner dodge and weave.

“That wasn’t the question we had last night or that we had in the impeachment,” Gardner said on Fox31. “The question we had was whether or not the president has the ability to investigate how taxpayer dollars are being spent. That’s the question, and I think that’s what we have to be concerned about.”

Nonsense.

So we listened to his remarks on the Senate floor again to see if maybe he was more clear.

“Policy differences about corruption and the proper use of tax dollars are at the heart of this impeachment,” Gardner said.

Gardner needs to work up a little courage, search his soul and answer the question that this impeachment was really about. Let’s say a jury has just sat through days of evidence in a trial for a man who is accused of walking into a bank and demanding money. If a juror insists the man is innocent but refuses to even talk about the charge of robbery because he says “that is not what the trial was about,” it’d be hard to move forward.

Gardner’s job is to take tough positions. He sits on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations for heaven’s sake, and for several years, Gardner has made combating Russian aggressions a cornerstone of his agenda, including pushing back on Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the superpower’s ongoing war with Ukraine. Of the lawmakers in Congress, Gardner is more qualified than all but a handful to have an opinion on whether what the president did was in the best interests of the U.S. or if it was a dangerous precedent for the president to set as he twisted foreign policy to work for his re-election campaign instead of the nation.

Just to recap, President Donald Trump had set up a three-pronged attack on Ukraine’s president to coerce him to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and a company that was involved in the investigation of the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee servers. One prong was ordering millions of dollars in military aid that Congress had appropriated to Ukraine to be withheld until his desired investigations were announced. He also had diplomats and White House officials pressure other Ukrainian officials to launch the investigations, and finally, he had his private attorney and his associates working back channels to achieve the same goal. The evidence that Trump did this is vast and deep, and very few senators even attempted to refute the facts.

Gardner once said he would stand up to his own party. Turns out he won’t even be critical of the actions of a member of his own party. He must believe what Trump did was fine. Why won’t he just say that?

Coloradans deserve a senator who will be straightforward and honest with them. Coloradans deserve a senator with a track record of bipartisanship. Coloradans deserve a senator who will call out things that are wrong and work to correct them. Coloradans deserve better than Cory Gardner.

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