In the battle over impeachment, Trump and the GOP have fired the first shots
In the battle over impeachment, Trump and the GOP have fired the first shots
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-the-battle-over-impeachment-trump-and-the-gop-have-fired-the-first-shots/2019/05/08/5d57fa6e-71d0-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html?utm_term=.21a600025b17
Our nation does not have to face a constitutional crisis, but we are barreling toward one at breakneck speed. The House should not have to move quickly toward impeachment, but it may now have little choice.
And let’s be clear: The prime mover in all this, who is perfectly happy to wreck our institutions to serve his own selfish interests, is President Trump. But we would not be courting chaos if Republicans in the House and Senate had not abandoned their commitments to fact and accountability in their zeal to help the president escape the consequences of his actions.
The week’s most important event was thus not Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee vote holding Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s craven, reckless partisanship in declaring “case closed” on Trump.
He said this despite special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report describing so many instances of obstruction of justice that nearly 800 former federal prosecutors signed a letter declaring that were Trump not president, the findings would lead to “multiple felony charges.” Case closed?
The report also detailed at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, by Trump and 18 of his associates, as the New York Times reported. We are not supposed to care about this? Case closed?
And in his acidic soliloquy on Tuesday, McConnell had the shameless audacity to blame President Barack Obama for Russia’s interference when it was McConnell himself who resisted the intelligence community’s findings about Russian meddling before the 2016 election. McConnell also led GOP efforts to block a bipartisan statement Obama sought that would have given the country some warning about what Vladimir Putin’s agents were doing. McConnell’s only consistency is his party-before-country commitment to protecting Trump.
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