Originally published on Smerconish.com
We all watched over the last six months as the various defenses offered up by some Trump loyalists in Congress to the President’s Ukraine actions retreated rapidly with the news of each passing month. What began as a flat denial of any wrongdoing in the end had fully evolved into “yes, he did it and it was inappropriate or wrong, but it just doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment.” I’ll call this the “Lamar Alexander position.”
I would be so much more sympathetic to that position if the president himself shared that view and owned it. Our justice system has always looked kindly upon defendants who admit their wrongdoing, express remorse for their behavior, contritely seek forgiveness, and promise it won’t happen again. If that were the case here, I could at least understand that view. However, there is nothing even remotely approaching contrition happening here.
Those who have fully retreated to the Lamar Alexander position are ignoring the inconvenient fact that the President himself is nowhere near any form of remorse or even an admission of wrongdoing. His all-too-familiar Trumpian defense which he maintains to this day is that he didn’t do the actions, and besides, the actions weren’t wrong. So adopting a position that acknowledges that he did in fact do the actions and that they were indeed wrong means that not only is the president lying day in and day out about his behavior, but, perhaps even worse, he is actively attempting to destroy reputations and careers of all in his path who have the gall to speak the truth about it.
How do those who hold Lamar Alexander’s position feel about what happened to Ukraine Ambassador Yovanovitch? Senator Alexander, who shares her beliefs about Trump’s wrongdoing, must then also believe that she was standing up for what is right by questioning the motives of Giuliani and all those he acted in concert with in Ukraine. However, for those noble efforts, her three decades of foreign service came to an abrupt end, after Trump predicted she was “about to go through some things.” Trump then fired her, tried to prevent her from being a witness, and tweeted insults at her literally as she was testifying to Congress.
Worse yet, Trump laughed and congratulated his Secretary of State Pompeo for lashing out at a reporter who was merely asking a question about why the Secretary of State wouldn’t speak up to defend Yovanovitch after Pompeo made the patently false statement that he had “defended every State Department Official.” He noticeably hasn’t defended her, by the way.
Pompeo then barred the reporter’s organization from traveling with him on a foreign trip. If you believe, as Lamar Alexander and others now do, that Trump’s actions in Ukraine were wrong, how can you not then also believe that he has shamefully wronged this career diplomat and struck a blow against free press in America by attempting to silence public discourse about it?
And if you hold the Lamar Alexander position that Trump did wrong here, you must also believe that the president has now completely destroyed the notion of federal protection for whistleblowers, as he both berated the whistleblower and retweeted a link to an article purporting to expose his identity, then stood back as his family and many of his supporters carried on a campaign to out and destroy him. Those advocating the Alexander position are completely ignoring these actions. Are there no consequences for any of that behavior, Senator Alexander?
And finally, focusing on this enormous debris field caused by Trump’s actions to defend himself makes Alan Dershowitz’s argument on the Senate floor in the impeachment trial even more ludicrous. The Harvard professor famously intimated that anything a president does that he deems to be in the best interests of the country - which includes his own reelection - cannot be impeachable. His focus in making that statement was on Trump withholding of aid that had been authorized by Congress. He failed to address all of Trump’s peripheral behavior – the damaging aftermath of lies, intimidation, cover up and deception. That inexcusable behavior is just as damaging as the underlying wrongdoing.
Nixon’s biggest sin, after all, was arguably not the underlying break-in of the DNC headquarters, but the cover up - the lies, deception and destruction of evidence involved, and having the audacity to drag the country through all that.
For all these reasons I don’t accept that the latest position adopted by Lamar Alexander and so many of his colleagues is principled. In taking this baby-splitting posture, they are not only finding that his underlying behavior merits no punishment or accountability, but that all the devastating, debilitating, democracy–crushing behavior that followed merits no action of any kind either.
So long as Trump and his lawyers continue to push the defense that he didn’t do the actions in the first place and besides the actions weren’t wrong, there can be no principled middle ground.
If my high school kid was being suspended from school for cheating on a test, I might try to make an argument on his behalf for leniency. If on the other hand, he continued to deny it in the face of obvious damning evidence, lashed out at all who accused him, sought to intimidate others into speaking out on his behalf, and all the while claimed to be the real victim, I think I’d just let the school do whatever the hell they wanted to him. That would be far better in the long run for both his future and that of the school.
We’re better than this, America. So much better.
At least I always thought so.