The country, for only the fourth time in its history, has now endured an opening week of impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives.
Some people who have the time have watched it blow by blow and minute by minute. But most of us haven't. For those of us in the latter category, this think offering is served up.
The highlight that shouldn't have been turned out to be the testimony of former Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. The daughter of Russian immigrants, Ms. Yovanovitch is a career foreign service officer. She was removed from her Ukrainian position, under criticism from President Trump, before the now infamous phone call.
The fact that she was removed before the phone call should have made her a fairly irrelevant witness unless the Democrats were able to lay foundation, which it does not appear that they could do, that she was removed as she was an obstacle to the quid pro quo suggestion. It now appears quite certain, as we'll note below, that this was more than a flight of fancy for Trump at the time of the call. Proving something like that is very difficult to do, and the GOP members of the House knew that and initially were taking the position of "why are you here?".
That blew up with the President, who claims he isn't watching the hearings, started tweeting about the former Ambassador while she was testifying. The tweets were insulting and the House Republicans couldn't endure it. In the end, they praised her service and the House gave her an ovation as she left.
The President and his Twitter account have long been subjects of discussion and now the nation is more or less immune to them. Still, this brings up one of the things we'll note below. Presidents shouldn't have Twitter accounts at all, and this conduct is not dignified. In addition, Twitter is frankly extremely juvenile in general as any conversation limited to a few words would have to be, and to the extent it isn't, it's when it points to something else. The fact that the President can't keep off of Twitter is itself quite disturbing.
The second think that occurred happened after the hearings were over for the week when it was revealed that a former National Security official has testified in a closed deposition that Gordon Sondland, envoy to the European Union, acted on the President's orders to require Ukraine to open an investigation into the Biden's.
So where does this leave everything?
It might make no difference at all, long term. Indeed, it now appears that the Impeachment Hearings aren't affecting the views of the electorate at all. Those who support Trump still do. Those who oppose him rather obviously still do. The murky middle, which hasn't made up its mind, still hasn't, left stuck as they are between tolerating a President that they don't like personally and at least partially politically or turning towards Democrats who themselves are turning more and more to the left. Indeed its notable that middle of the road Democrats are suddenly either entering the race or gaining ground in the polls, and that President Obama even made a statement about the hard left positions of his party over the weekend.
In terms of impeachability, the question still remains whether or not the conduct complained of is actually illegal. It frankly may very well not be.
For that reason the Administration floated the "everybody does it" defense a couple of weeks ago, which wasn't well received. And frankly, the couple of instances of analogous, roughly, conduct that I can think of in some cases were illegal. Not all, but some. Be that as it may, not everyone does this.
But that may make it really politically unwise, not illegal. For that reason, some Democrats have suggested that the "misdemeanor" line in the Impeachment text of the Constitution means "misdemeaning the office", whatever that is.
That argument takes the power really close to a vote of no confidence type of roll, which is what these hearings really strike me as. While what exactly the founders meant when they stated that a President could be removed for "high crimes and misdemeanors" is somewhat unclear, they didn't mean that the process could take on that role. The House should be, therefore, extremely careful about evolving it into that, as once that occurs, there's no end to claims by an unhappy political party that an opponent is "midemeaning" his office.
Probably aware of that, there's been a recent effort to convert the "quid pro quo" conversation into bribery, but that frankly doesn't float legally. Lots of conversations, including reprehensible but legal ones, have a quid pro quo aspect to them. The real time tweeting by the President about the Ambassador was floated as witness tampering, but that is really a strained suggestion as well.
On that latter point, something occurred to me that I was going to post and then I heard a pundit note the same thing, depriving me of a clean "you heard it hear first" claim. I'll claim it anyhow.
There have been a lot of comparisons to this process and earlier impeachment efforts, but none of them really feel right. It didn't occur to me at first, but then the tone of the last week caused it to occur to me. These hearings don't feel like prior impeachment proceedings, they feel like the hearings of the McCarthy Era.
Now, before anyone jumps up to make assumptions on that, I'm not making a direct overall comparison and I don't even really hold the fully standard view of Joe McCarthy that is accepted text. But what I will note is that McCarthy, who really broke very little new ground of any kind in his hearings (and who was almost certainly being fed information from the FBI), grew increasingly extreme in his tone. The entire thing broke down and his career was ruined during the McCarthy Army hearings at the point at which witness Joseph Welch asked him "have you no decency sir?" After that, McCarthy was done.
The point here is that McCarthy was not a polished man and came across as a bull in a china shop from the onset. Other hearings on the same topics had happened before and in fact were going on in the Senate at the same time. McCarthy's behavior drew the attention of a press that didn't like him and his own boorish behavior brought him and his work down. He was a hero for awhile, but in the end, things blew up on him. When they did, the press and the Democrats really turned on him and his own party distanced itself.
President Trump should take a lesson from that, but likely won't, and can't, just as McCarthy seemingly couldn't arrest his own inclinations even when there were warning signs it was going to get him into trouble. The entire atmosphere here has bee similar to the McCarthy era with the President taking the role of McCarthy. Attacking the Ambassador definitely went too far. The hearings now have the feel of those 1950s hearings in which civility was completely stripped and accusations flew out in public in a raw form. In the end, that didn't serve McCarthy well even though, when his claims are looked at years later from a factual and analytical light, he was more right than wrong.
All that should give us a little hope, however, as when the McCarthy era ended the nation returned to a normal level of civility very quickly. We've been living in an increasingly rude and ruder era now for at least twenty years. If we're now surprised by how quickly insults fly, we probably shouldn't be. Maybe this is where the pendulum swings and people start addressing each other with more civility. If so, perhaps we can now quit having an entire selection of East Coast politicians that should like they're playing roles in Goodfellas.
And maybe Congressman Jim Jordan can find his coat.
Off to the next week of hearings, which may conclude them.
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