Donald Trump held up congressionally approved military aid to Russia-threatened Ukraine. During that time, he asked Ukrainian officials to announce that they would investigate one of his leading American political opponents.
Then he defied Congress' legitimate authority to demand cooperative information from the executive branch so that it could do its duty and investigate the aforementioned.
That's the simple case in two paragraphs.
It is a case suitable for impeachment, entailing a clearly established abuse of authority. The uncontroverted misconduct fits easily under the define-as-you-wish standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors."
But the real question is whether impeachment in this circumstance is compulsory, which is the latest line from liberal Democrats, and politically effective with swing voters in battleground states, which polls suggest it may not be.
Liberal Democrats have taken to saying that, no matter the political consideration or the prohibitive odds against conviction in the Senate, they have no choice but to vote for impeachment. If Trump gets away with this, they say, then future presidents will be green-lighted to behave in a law-defiant and monarchical way.
I disagree.
Future presidents can be considered separately if and when they do something similar, a prospect we could best avert by electing better people than megalomaniacal madmen.
Like the Mueller Report, the Intelligence Committee report in the Ukrainian affair makes a damning case, but one not quite amounting to a lay-down hand.
If the money had remained withheld while Ukraine indeed undertook an investigation of Joe Biden, then there would exist a lay-down hand. But with the money released and no investigation undertaken or even announced, the case is something a little less than a flush or a straight or a full house.
Obstruction or contempt of Congress would more certainly occur after a highly probable final court ruling that the president and his people do not have the privileged exceptions they are asserting, and if the White House continued to defy even then.
Impeachment is a political action. It is suitable, then, for House Democrats to consider the political fallout when, inevitably, conviction in the Senate is not achieved. It is suitable for them to consider what they will have accomplished. It is suitable for them to consider all the tools available to them to sanction a misbehaving president, including the biggest and best tool of all, meaning the election in November.
And it's suitable for them to come to a practical political conclusion: If it's futile and politically risky to impeach, but vital to go on record for future reference in saying a president cannot get away with what this one clearly has done, then why not leave futility and risk alone and offer a smarter motion to make an official censure of the president?
Such an action would officially condemn action that, for purposes of precedent, must not be condoned. It would appeal to swing voters who would appreciate the retreat from an exercise in noise that fatigues or offends them. It would show Democrats capable of attending at once both to accountability for the presidential miscreant and practical political modulation for themselves.
Yes, the president would stay in office and chortle about his supposed innocence. And that's exactly what he'll be doing after impeachment.
Censure would force Trump-cowed Republicans in Congress, but I repeat myself, to cast a vote not against political overplay, but against a simple calling-down of presidential behavior that they and three-fifths of the American people know to have been wrong.
Let Trump oppose even censure. That would show the action to be meaningful. Or let him crow about the Democrats backing down to censure, which would have him essentially accepting the sanction and deriding Democrats for showing the very thing Americans are hungry for--common-sense political restraint.
It's even possible, though perhaps I go too far, that a couple of Republicans in swing districts might vote for censure.
Democrats could keep active the impeachment inquiry with an open invitation for whistle-blowers to come forward again if they had new or additional information.
The political peril for Democrats would be anger and resentment in the liberal base among people who want to impeach mainly for their own adrenaline rush of branding "impeached" on the forehead of this horrid man.
But adrenaline rush is neither a serious policy nor smart tactic. And the joy surely would be greater if experienced electorally in November in partnership with voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
An election actually would oust this outrage, not pretend to shame the shameless.
It is a modern political equation: The more frustrated the left becomes with Democrats, the more palatable Democrats become to swing voters in the decisive states.
If the left stayed home and refused to vote against Trump because they hadn't been allowed to impeach him inconsequentially ... that nonsense would amount to a nose departed and face spited.
Don't impeach for the thrill. Defeat for the moral imperative.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/15/2019