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babylonsister

(171,054 posts) Mon Oct 21, 2019, 06:58 PM Oct 2019

Dahlia Lithwick: Lindsey Graham Isn't Breaking From Donald Trump

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/lindsey-graham-quid-pro-quo-not-break-from-trump.html

Lindsey Graham Isn’t Breaking From Donald Trump
Trump allies, including Graham, are trying to make “no quid pro quo” this scandal’s “no collusion.”
By Dahlia Lithwick
Oct 21, 2019
5:45 PM

snip//

I don’t see Graham’s comments last week as signaling anything of the sort. Instead I’d wager that Graham, whose pivot from Trump critic to Olympian bootlicker in recent years has birthed a million conspiracy theories, was working harder to prop up the Trump-Is-Perfection line of analysis than almost anyone else. Graham did just exactly what Trump and the White House and Senate Republicans needed him to do: He moved the impeachment goal posts.

Look at what Graham said again. He claimed that he would vote for impeachment in the Senate as soon as someone showed him “a crime,” and not only that—it needed to be a crime that was “outside the phone call.” In the event that you missed the head-feint there, under the plain language of the Constitution, impeachment requires no finding of criminal lawbreaking. The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal of the president and other high officers for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” We know what treason and bribery mean, but “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while amorphous, surely encompass a lot more than merely breaking criminal laws. As Frank Bowman has explained here in Slate, the notion that impeachment remedies only criminal conduct makes no sense.

Witness the same moving of goal posts when Graham goes one further in his alleged concession on impeachment to Axios. Not only does he claim that he needs to be shown a crime, he then goes on to constrain the crime he needs to see as one that demands a quid pro quo. First of all, recognize the absurdity of Graham saying he needs more proof of quid pro quo outside of that phone call, given that the phone call provides a pretty clear indication that quid pro quo-ing was going on. As professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School (also a Slate contributor) noted in an email to me:

Sen. Graham does seem to be parroting WH talking points, and not the most effective ones, either. Saying he needs to be “shown” that “Trump was actually engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call,” is particularly bizarre. What about the call itself? It was hardly chopped liver. Its explicit use of the word “though” to link (a) the president’s willingness to release the aid that Congress had voted and that Ukraine was desperately seeking to defend itself from Putin’s aggression, to (b) the favor Trump wanted in return was enough in itself to establish that Trump was conditioning the aid package on assistance in his political quest both to erase Russia’s influence on his original election and to undermine his most likely 2020 opponent. If that’s not “quid pro quo,” nothing is.

snip//

It’s not paranoia to suggest that whenever you are offered impeachment assistance from the likes of Graham, you’ll first want to check that gift horse for bleeding gums, cavities, and halitosis before agreeing that he’s actually moving the needle on the impeachment process. In this instance, Graham isn’t edging Senate Republicans closer to an impeachment conviction. He’s trying to change the threshold for impeachable offenses into something that is possibly unmeetable (assuming Mulvaney can stop talking) and creating a but-for test that Senate Republicans can hide behind if they want to vote no. Just as presidential misconduct with Russia never should have been confined to “collusion,” impeachable conduct cannot rise and fall over explicit quid pro quos in criminal bribery statutes.

To be sure, the debate over whether or not there was a quid pro quo on offer is useful, and it’s even useful for proving noncriminal abuse of power claims. But while we can argue about quid pro quos to establish misconduct for public opinion purposes, it remains a tiny piece of the puzzle. If it turns out that a quid pro quo around aid to Ukraine can be proved, that’s outstanding news for House Democrats. But it is not necessary for a criminal impeachment conviction, and Senate Republicans should not be permitted to hide behind claims that it is. Graham’s statements should be recognized for exactly what they are—a line of defense for Trump, and a distortion of the constitutional floor for impeachment, and nothing close to a crack in the wall of protection for the president.