Trump’s defense team tortures founders’ clear intent

The separation of powers and system of checks and balances is what the founders hammered out and we inherited. Their constitutional system divides the government’s power between Congress, the president, and the courts. Each of these branches can check, or limit, the other branches’ power.

The president, for example, can veto a law passed by Congress. Congress, in turn, can override the president’s veto with a two-thirds majority vote. The president is the commander-in-chief, but only Congress can declare war. The Supreme Court can rule a law unconstitutional. Congress and the states can amend the Constitution to nullify the court’s ruling.

And Congress can impeach and remove the president from office.

This constitutional check on presidential power was important to the founders because they’d just fought to free themselves from one king and feared the rise of another. At first they considered whether regular elections would offer sufficient protection against an abusive president, but they concluded that impeachment was “indispensable for defending” the republic, especially against a president who would “betray his trust to foreign powers” and “practiced corruption” to win election.

They also prophetically noted the “great opportunities of abusing his power” available to a president “particularly in time of war, when the military force, and in some respects the public money, will be in his hands.”

So much that I heard from President Trump’s defense team tortures the founders’ clear intent. The founders’ chief fear wasn’t that a president might violate a specific criminal statute. They were instead most determined to guard the republic against a president who “attempts to subvert the Constitution” by abusing his power. They asked the rhetorical question “Shall any man be above justice?” and their resounding answer was no.

Yes, Hamilton warned against impeachments “regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” Partisan bias, however, can motivate a president’s defenders as well as his prosecutors.

No one is “tearing up ballots.” The explicit purpose of impeachment is the necessary removal of an elected president. Nor did modern Democrats invent the constitutional provision that a president duly removed from office is liable to “disqualification to hold” future office.

Despite his defense team’s repeated allegation, President Trump wasn’t impeached over a “policy dispute.” There is, however, glaring irony in their attempt to defend him by repeatedly alleging the superiority of his Ukraine policy.

It’s even ranker hypocrisy to claim there’s insufficient evidence of the president’s guilt while you deliberately block the presentation of relevant witnesses and evidence. On his deathbed, Chief Justice Warren warned that if President Nixon was successful in denying Congress access to the evidence in his tapes, “then liberty will soon be dead in this nation.”

Clever lawyering isn’t justice. Justice discourages wrongdoing. It keeps us safe from peril now and in the future.

We stand in peril.

Some Republicans concede that President Trump’s actions were “inappropriate” or “not what I would have done,” or that they “crossed the line.” Several expressed confidence that he’d “learned a lesson,” that he’d “think twice” next time. His defenders argue he didn’t obstruct justice, that he was instead protecting the executive privilege rights of future presidents. Others rest on his insistence he did nothing wrong.

Tell me. What’s the likelihood that a self-serving flouter of presidential norms would care a fig about the prerogatives of future presidents? Is a narcissist who stands before a memorial to fallen CIA officers and brags about how many magazine covers he’s appeared on likely to see beyond his own reflection?

Is a man who lies about the weather and his inaugural crowd size likely to tell the incriminating truth about his corrupt motives and deeds?

When the nation was 50 years old, a young Abraham Lincoln foresaw that men with particular genius and ambition would rise up among us to subvert the law and lead us as tyrants. “When such a one does,” Lincoln exhorted, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and the laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”

Following Mr. Lincoln’s death, his successor, Andrew Johnson, faced an impeachment trial. Several senators felt compelled by conscience to vote against their party.

When it was Edmund Ross’s turn, he knew what his conscience was about to cost him: “I almost literally looked down into my open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.”

He voted his conscience.

I watched the State of the Union performance the night before the Senate met to acquit President Trump.

I watched the chanting, glad-handing senators who’d stopped their ears and turned their backs on witnesses. I thought of Ross, and Lincoln.

I couldn’t help feeling shame and grief.

The founders have suffered a defeat.

And so have we.

Peter Berger, who lives in Mount Holly, Vt., has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him at news@stowereporter.com.