GUEST BLOG / By The Editorial Board
of the St. Louis
Dispatch--Try as Republicans will to
distract the American public and label the impeachment inquiry a witch hunt,
there is no escaping the hard truth that President Donald Trump solicited help
from a foreign leader for his 2020 campaign, an act that U.S. law specifically
forbids. Republican leaders in Congress find themselves, once again, scrambling
furiously to concoct a believable defense for a man whose conduct is
indefensible.
Trump’s
recklessness and divisiveness is exhausting the nation’s patience. How far will
GOP leaders in Congress allow Trump to drag this country down before they stand
in defense of the Constitution?
Make no
mistake: There’s a troubling coincidence between former Vice President Joe
Biden’s intervention in 2014 to urge the ouster of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor
and son Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of a gas company owned by a
corrupt, Russia-friendly Ukrainian oligarch. Hunter Biden received upwards of
$50,000 a month in that role, a shocking change of fortunes for someone who had
just been dismissed from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
If Joe
Biden was involved in illegality, let the Justice Department initiate an
investigation and follow leads. But so far, five years after those
developments, investigators seem not to have uncovered prosecutable violations.
Trump had
no apparent authority to launch his independent corruption probe and bring in
his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to follow up with Ukraine President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump — who has paid off a porn star, bragged about
sexually abusing women and openly urged Russia to meddle in the 2016
presidential campaign — ranks as the most corrupt U.S. president since Richard
Nixon.
Trump was
on a singular mission in the July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy: to dig up dirt
on Biden, his likely rival in the 2020 presidential race. The fact that he
brought Giuliani into the conversation underscores that this had nothing to do
with Trump’s executive authority and everything to do with his political
campaign.
Juxtaposed
with Trump’s inexplicable decision before July to suspend nearly $400 million
in aid to Ukraine, there is more than ample justification for the House of
Representatives to proceed with its impeachment inquiry. In the transcript
released Wednesday, Zelenskiy raised his country’s military-assistance needs.
Trump invoked the word “reciprocal” and immediately asked Zelenskiy “to do us a
favor” by helping investigate Joe Biden and his son.
Rep. Adam
Schiff, D-Calif., accurately labeled the exchange a “classic, Mafia-like
shakedown of a foreign country.”
How far
must a president go in betraying his country before Republicans finally declare
that he no longer represents their values? How much crisis, chaos and scandal
can Republicans, exhausted from constantly defending him, tolerate before they
decide enough’s enough? The time has come for Republicans to stand up for the
Constitution, stand up for America, and tell Trump to step down.
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