The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Donald Trump Has Committed High Crimes and Misdemeanours

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Should Donald Trump be removed from office? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, The Atlantic's David Frum and The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel debate the motion Be it resolved, Donald Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanours.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Our mission, every episode, is to provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation. By the end of each debate, our hope is that you'll be armed with enough information to make up your own mind about any given issue. Today's debate, be it resolved. Donald Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. This is not a matter of a president negotiating with a foreign power on behalf of the United States. The president was looking for a benefit for himself personally.

And this was an extortion. Donald Trump inspires deep loathing in his critics, but mere disgust should not and it cannot be a reason to overturn our basic mechanisms of representative democracy. President Trump is charged with abuse of power for pressuring the Ukraine to assist him in his re-election campaign. many see Trump's actions as meeting the founders of the American Constitution's definition of an impeachable offense, or high crimes and misdemeanors. The president's defenders say, this is anything but the case. U.S. presidents regularly bargain in horse trade with foreign heads of state. It's part of the job description. Arguing for the motion is David Frum, senior editor of the Atlantic, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Trumpocracy,

the corruption of the American Republic. Arguing against the motion is Kimberly Strassel, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, an author of the recent bestseller, Resistance at all costs. Kimberly, David, welcome back to the Monk Debates in our new podcast iteration. It's great to be here, you, Richard.

Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Kimberly. Well, David, as per debate convention, you're speaking in favor of the motion, so we're going to have you go first. Let's hear your opening remarks. At the convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, many of the authors of the Constitution were unsure whether to include an impeachment possibility at all. The argument that carried the day was this. The United States shared the continent with other states, richer and more powerful,

Great Britain, France, Spain. What if one of those richer and more powerful states bribed the president of the United States to get him to derelict his duties? As the French king, Louis XIV, had bribed the English king, Charles II, in the memory of many of those founders. That argument wobbled them, and they agreed that merely removing the president at the next interval, the next election, would not suffice if you had a president who was engaged in receiving bribes. That is the core evil that the impeachment power addressed. Now, Donald Trump has been receiving foreign payments since the day he became president, since the election. He's never stopped. What happened in the summer of 2019, however, was different. Instead of merely putting out

his hand to receive the bribes, in the summer of 2019, the president extorted a bribe or attempted to from the government of Ukraine, a vulnerable democracy invaded by a foreign power. The president delayed money, voted by Congress in February of 2019. President Trump himself signed the bill to give money to Ukraine. If he had objections, he had ample opportunity to raise those objections back in February. The president instead signed the bill, allowed the aid to go into the system, but himself surreptitiously stopped it. For the president to refuse to spend money already provided by Congress is itself illegal, not criminal, but illegal. But for the president to do so for his own selfish purposes in order to extract a benefit for himself personally. That is the essence of what the impeachment

power was designed to end off. There's no real factual dispute about what happened here. This is not a matter of a president negotiating with a foreign power on behalf of the United States. It is undisputed by anybody's series. The president was looking for a benefit for himself personally. And this was an extortion. The president was able to delay aid to Ukraine until September of 2019 when thanks to a courageous whistleblower whom the president has tried to name and retaliate against, the scheme became public. At that point, the money began to flow. But in the months that the money was delayed, Russia stepped up its violence against Ukraine. This was not a victimless crime. The months in which the aid was delayed, August and September, were two of the bloodiest months

in the history of the Ukraine-Russia war. Exactly how all of this will play out, I can't predict. Obviously, there is politics. But as to the question of whether we as individuals, whatever the Senate does, can name wrong as wrong and say that extortion for a bribe for the president's selfish political advantage that had real world costs for identifiable human beings, if that's not wrong, it's hard to see what is wrong. Last thought, Kimberly Now and I once worked for the Wall Street Journal. That paper passionately called for the impeachment of President Clinton in the 1990s for a crime relating to perjury in his private life. I actually endorsed that at the time. I agreed with it. But what we are going to be asked to believe today is that what Donald Trump did by extorting Ukraine

and putting lives at risk was less serious than what Bill Clinton did. And that I don't think anybody can reasonably accept. David, thank you for that compelling opening statement. Well, Kimberly, up for your rebuttal now, your opening statement, pushing back on David's remarks. Let's put three minutes on the clock for you. The microphone's now yours. Sure thing. Well, as David noted, many of America's founding fathers argued vociferously against including an impeachment power in the Constitution for fear that it would be weaponized turned by a partisan House majority into a tool for settling political differences. And we now understand that fear. Donald Trump stands guilty of being a polarizing president. He stands guilty of bad judgment even in mentioning a

political rival to a foreign leader. But he does not stand guilty of a high crime or a misdemeanor, which is the exceptionally high bar the founders required to overturn an election and in this case the will of 63 million voters. You know, I agree with David. Their facts are not in dispute. From the minute the White House voluntarily made public Donald Trump's transcript of his call with Ukraine's president. Americans could see for themselves that there was no crime, much less a high crime. Mr. Trump discussed a political rival, and he discussed foreign aid to Ukraine. He never tied the two together. Those are the clear words. Democrats have never in the course of their impeachment proceedings provided any evidence of a link. The Ukrainians were unaware

that there was even a hold on foreign aid. And more importantly, they got the money, despite no investigation into Joe or Hunter Biden. You don't need to take my word on the weakness of this case. Take Democrats' actions. Legitimate impeachment proceedings do not require secret hearings. They don't leak piecemeal, juicy bits of testimony out of context. They don't bar the White House from presenting a defense. They don't deny the opposing party the right to call witnesses.

They don't rush to hit political timelines. and they don't subvert the Constitution by denying for weeks the Senate's ability to hold a trial. Most importantly, legitimate impeachment doesn't begin with claims of quid pro quo, then after holding focus groups switched to claims of bribery and extortion, and then one unable to hit that bar change yet again to amorphous accusations of abuse of power or contempt of Congress. That is what the articles of impeachment claim. yet these are definitions that can't be found in any criminal statute and that are so dangerously broad that they could remove any president past or any president future. Finally, legitimate impeachments convince a bipartisan majority of the country the need to take a step so grave as removing a president.

Democrats haven't even convinced their own members, many of whom voted against the final articles, and they haven't even convinced a bare majority of the country. Donald Trump inspires deep loathing in his critics, but mere disgust should not and he cannot be a reason to overturn our basic mechanisms of representative democracy, which are elections. Mr. Trump is going to be America's president for at most five years. The enormous damage Democrats have done to the Constitution by unleashing impeachment is going to haunt presidencies for generations to come. Thank you, Kimberly. Well, let's just quickly encapsulate your two arguments here. David, you've made a case, a compelling one, that if you look at the founders' reasons for including impeachment as a power in the Constitution, in your view, this speaks directly to your perception of what he did with the Ukrainian government and why. Kimberly, you're saying, in effect, that the onus to overturn an election is a matter. massive one and that the case that the Democratic controlled Congress has made is insufficient to reach that bar and that this process in itself has done great damage to the U.S.

Republic. So now let's get you both to quickly rebut here. David, do you want to pull out a key idea or two of Kimberleys that you want to focus on and rebut? Let me focus on two. The first is impeachment does not overturn. election. All the acts that Donald Trump legally did while president will remain valid juridical acts. All of those acts, the tax cut, all of them will remain in effect. So the election will not be

overturned. And if Donald Trump were removed, the person would succeed him would be his vice president, Mike Pence, who would continue Republican presidency. The fact that 63 million people voted for Donald Trump is no more relevant to this than the fact that 66 million voted against him. The election is the election. The crime was committed after the election, and the punishment, therefore, has to come logically in sequence in time after the election. I want to take another point up that Kimberly mentioned was that the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold. Even if this claim were true, I don't know why it would matter, but of course it's not true. The Ukrainians instantly became aware. I mean, they can read the Wall Street Journal. They can see that the appropriation

was voted in February, that they got their certification from the Department of Defense in May, and they know the money did not flow. Something was holding it up. Now, they didn't know exactly how maliciously the president was acting, but they knew that the president was delaying their aid. And in August, the Russians, who knew it too, began to escalate violence against Ukraine, causing more and more desperation against Ukraine as their soldiers died. Thank you, David. Kimberly, come back on that. Are a couple key points that David's either made just now or in his opening statement that you want to zero in on. Well, you will note that David continues to use the word bribery, continues to use the word extortion, but I would ask him or anyone to please point to me in the articles of impeachment where those words are used.

They're not for a simple reason, because if you look at the historical definition of bribery, if you look at current statutory definitions of bribery, they involve the exchange of things of value. No exchange was made here. no investigation into Joe or Hunter Biden and the money flowed. And as a result, even Democrats implicitly acknowledged that they could not hit that bar, which is why we instead have these amorphous articles of impeachment. Again, abuse of power. That's a very scary word. It's in the eye of the beholder and contempt of Congress. He gave us no choice. What we are discussing today is the established fact that the president violated the Constitution. It is a matter of fact

that the president is an ongoing threat to our national security and the integrity of our elections, the basis of our democracy. The three times the United States is engaged in impeachment proceedings prior to this, the House of Representatives pointed directly to statutes and crimes that were committed. The bars should be at least that high, if not higher, bribery and extortion are not ones that was hit here. So I think that that's one important thing to make. Also, David continues to point about violence. Let's remember that that brief hold on aid did nothing more than return the United States to the policy that Barack Obama had followed for eight years of not providing money for lethal aid. So if indeed that somehow damaged national security or

caused the loss of life in the Ukraine than the prior president has far more to answer for for so many years of following that policy. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, Donald Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, all on our website, monkdebates.com. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Let's have another round of rebuttals. David, come back. I mean, Kimberly's made some pointed interjections here on a couple of the key points that you've made. What's your rebuttal?

It is a delicate matter how much the presidency needs to share with Congress. And in times past, this has been sometimes a bumpy relationship. And that's been true in many, many administrations. But in the end, the two parts of the government usually worked out some kind of accommodation, some kind of conditions. What was unique about what President Trump did, it exceeded anything that Richard Nixon did during Watergate. He delivered a blank refusal to produce any documents, and to produce any of the people in his administration who were relevant witnesses to what happened. John Bolton, the man who described the president's actions as a drug deal, was not allowed to testify. The president refused to allow his aide Mick Mulvaney,

who's both chief of staff and OMB, an unprecedented arrangement, one that is very convenient for controlling flows of money without leaving a paper trail, would not allow him to testify. He completely defied any oversight possibility for Congress at all. The president's argument and the president's defender's argument has been to create a kind of Escher's staircase of unreviewability to say, Congress can't ask these questions, and they can't impeach because they don't have the documents that the questions that the president's obstruction was designed to prevent them from getting. All of this creates a claim of absolute presidential impunity to do anything.

One of the core arguments of the defenders of Donald Trump is to efface entirely the distinction between the president acting in the national interest and the president acting in the personal interest. I happen to disagree, for example, with President Obama's decision not to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, very emotionally involved in the Ukraine issue from the time the war began in 2014. But there's no question that President. Obama's policy wrong as I thought it was motivated by his understanding of the public interest. Donald Trump wasn't acting the public interest. In fact, he had promised to give legal aid to Ukraine.

He began offering it in 2017. He held it back for his own personal purposes to fabricate dirt against a political opponent. And it did have real world effects. It was not a brief hold, not from the point of view of the Ukrainian soldiers who found themselves without lethal aid as Russia stepped up its attack in their country in August. Kimberly, can you come back on on David, case here for obstruction, the extent to which this president has seemed to demand, require a blanket restriction on all of his staff, in his view to uphold, in the president's view, to uphold his and future president's rights to executive privilege. What's your argument against David as to why there aren't really, there isn't a serious case here for obstruction at a level

that we just haven't seen in our own lifetimes? Well, I think you have to look at the history here. Why would Donald Trump take such an unusual step of refusing to accommodate any request? And that, of course, gets to the history, how we ended up at this particular impeachment proceeding. Remember, Democrats didn't just go along three years merrily and suddenly stumble across the Ukrainian issue and decide that it was their solemn duty to take up the question of impeachment. They have been promising to impeach Donald Trump from the moment he was first put in office. They tried it with Russian collusion. That wasn't real. They tried it with obstruction of justice of the Mueller report. Even Bob Mueller wouldn't go out and say definitively that that had happened.

They looked at the payments to Stormy Daniels. They looked at the emoluments clause. This has been coming forever and ever. And when they finally decided to pull the pen on this, the administration's decision was that it was not going to aid in that effort, which had been so inevitable from the start. For three straight years, radical Democrats have been trying to overthrow the results of a great, great election, maybe, maybe the greatest election in the history of our country. Now, I think more importantly, Democrats had every opportunity to challenge that decision. And indeed, they initially went to court to attempt to compel John Bolton and others to testify. and we were headed toward a situation in which the normal process would have worked its way. The courts would have stepped in and said what limits actually guided questions of executive privilege

and what limits were on that executive privilege, what was required to be handed over to Congress. Democrats decided that that just wasn't convenient in the end because they were going to have to wait several months. and that would put them into their own primary season, put them closer to the election, and make their impeachment case even weaker. So they withdrew or attempted to withdraw from that lawsuit. We should have gone through the normal process. Now, if a court had rendered a decision and Donald Trump had refused to comply with it, by all means, yes, that would be contempt of the judiciary and Congress. But we simply do not know if he engaged in contempt because no court has yet. rendered a verdict. Thank you, Kimberly. For the benefit of our listeners, I want us to spend a bit of

time focusing on the kind of subcharges under the abuse of power heading that forms the basis now of the communication of the House to the Senate vis-à-vis impeachment. And the first, you know, heading, if you look at the document, is the charge of soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election. And let's spend a little time focusing on that. And maybe, David, I want you come back on a point that Kimberly made earlier that I thought was interesting, which is she asserted that at no point has anyone ever tied specifically the discussion of the Bidens and perceived corruption or not that Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, engaged in in the Ukraine with the withholding of the aid to the Ukrainian military. Do you accept that? These two things have not been conclusively tied.

I think we need to be a little bit more respectful of the abilities of the human mind. As his longtime attorney, now in prison, Michael Cohen said, Donald Trump communicates his unlawful wishes in kinds of code. I mean, he doesn't speak grammatical English even at the best of times. But when he's in the moment of discussing a crime, he does not say outright, will you commit a crime? He tells you what he wants to happen. And then he points to the consequence that will happen if you do not commit the crime. It is true. The Ukrainian state, a weak state underlaw, heroically, showed more respect for American democracy than the president of the United States did by looking for ways not to do

this terrible thing that the president had asked the Ukrainian government to do. The Chinese government also refused to do the thing that the president wanted when he demanded on October 3rd that China fabricate, on television, when he demanded that China fabricate dirty against Joe Biden if it wanted to have better treatment in trade talks. It happens in front of us. Kimberly makes the argument that Donald Trump should be regarded as innocent of this charge because he has committed so many wrongs before because there have been so many scandals. The reason Donald Trump doesn't want to reveal documents is not because he cares about the authority of the office.

I mean, look at how he personally insults and demeans all of his predecessors and anybody who might possibly succeed him. This is a man with no respect for anybody. A statement that Joe Biden is a low IQ individual. He probably is. The more America achieves, the more hateful and enrage these crazy Democrats become. Crazy. They're crazy.

I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he's a very sick man. That crazy Nancy, she is crazy. The reason Donald Trump does not reveal is because he is right now in receipt of flows of undisclosed millions of dollars from foreign government. How much is Donald Trump receiving from the two Trump towers in Istanbul? No one knows. Has that an influence on his decision to abandon the Kurds to the Turkish army?

We can't answer. How much money is Donald Trump receiving from Trump projects in India? Nobody knows. Does that have an influence on his decisions between India and Pakistan? Uncertain. Donald Trump is determined that nobody ever find out. And that's why he is so secretive. But it's not about respect for the office.

If he had respect for the office, he would behave with a little decorum in the office. So, Kimberly, come back on this specific charge of soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election, because as David has unpacked it, on the face of it, it seems that there is causality here. There's a strong suggestion that the president was asking for these investigations, tied them to the age, and the investigations were in his political interest. It wasn't just any American by random who he was interested in having investigated. It was the son of his major potential democratic opponent. Well, I always find it amusing that people in general like to claim that Donald Trump is a blundering oaf who can't get through one minute to the next without making a mistake. And at the same time, call him a strategic mastermind who speaks in code. He's just that subtle. Look, the real problem for Donald Trump with this transcript is that he's not subtle at all. He's not as subtle even as some of his predecessors who engage in exactly the same sort of things, but just did it with a lot more subtlety.

I would give you the example, for instance, of Barack Obama in 2012. When he asked the Russians to please pause, to give him a little bit of breathing room, this was caught on a hot mic. Okay, we can take it that Barack Obama really did want the Russians to behave better, okay? That was the policy objective.

But there's no getting around the fact that that request was also for his personal political benefit, given that at the time his Republican competitors, editor for the presidency, Mitt Romney was beating on him for being too soft on Russia. So to the extent that Russia shaped up, it was going to be to the personal political benefit of Barack Obama, as well as a good policy objective. This is the way too often, most often, of diplomacy. And if we decide to criminalize these acts, it's simply because one person is more subtle than the other, we go down a very dangerous road. The reality is we do not know the context in which Donald Trump was having this

discussion. We still do not have a definitive answer from anyone who was a principal witness to this about exactly why the aid was withheld. They have acknowledged as such. And the Democrats, again, would not take the time to go to court to call those people to get permission, to interview them, and to get actual information from those who were closest to the president. This is not in any way been proven and engaging in vast amounts of conjecture about what Donald Trump may or may not do in Turkey or in any of Azerbaijan, these are all sinister words. But with no evidence, with no proof. My point is that if you are going to remove a president, you must prove a high crime. And there is no crime proven here. Again, I'd love Mr. Fromm to point me to where abuse of power is found in a

criminal statute. David, that is a good part of this debate. I think helpful again for listeners to unpack, because I'm sure you have a view that this isn't a criminal trial, that criminal law does not apply here. This is a trial in the Senate related to articles of impeachment contained within the U.S. Constitution, and therefore, I guess I assume that you would feel that it would unfold along different lines than a formal criminal trial based on criminal statute. Well, Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached after the civil war was impeached for firing his secretary of war in violation of a statute of Congress that said the president needs the advice and consent to remove as well as a point. That's ancient history,

but there's no quite, that was not a criminal statute. No one suggested that Andrew Johnson had committed a crime. But it was a statute, David. It was a statute. Yeah, well, the Hobbs Act is also statute. It is illegal for the president to use his office to get a personal benefit. I mean, I assure you that there- Articles of impeachment? It doesn't matter because if the claim is that the president, that it's illegal, it's not illegal for an official to extort someone to give them a personal benefit for an official act. Of course that's illegal. And of course that's actually criminal.

There's no doubt about that. I mean, when Kimberly described President Obama's conversation with Medvedev in March of 2012, the hot mic moment, the aisle have more space. And this is a point that is often used by Trump defenders. At that moment, Obama and then Russian Prime Minister Medvedev were engaged in an argument about missile defense. Medvedev wanted Obama to scale back missile defense, and Obama was evading the question. And so what he said was, after the election, I'll think about it. That was not a corrupt conversation. He was not seeking any personal benefit.

Give me space until we get past an election. You don't think that's of any personal benefit to Barack Obama. Presidents often avoid things they don't want to deal with by saying, after my election, I'll think about it. President Obama's views on missile defense are certainly not mine. I think it's good. He thought it was destabilizing. But I have no doubt that what President Obama was doing was pursuing the national interest

as he thought it was right. I can see that in my political opponents. What Donald Trump is doing is a different order of thing. He was seeking a benefit for himself. And he, but for the extraordinary. heroism of a Ukrainian president, he would have got it with catastrophic effects for international security and for our elections. And Donald Trump is still doing it. They are still putting pressure on the Ukrainians. And who knows what they are offering in China? Last thing, when Kimberly says,

look, there's a lot of surmise here. Well, of course we have to do some surmise when we're trying to understand Donald Trump's finances because of his absolute refusal to do any of the disclosures that all of his modern predecessors has done. So you're right. I have to conjecture. How much is he getting from Istanbul and is that one of the reasons why he sold out the Kurds? I don't know. I'd like to know. The president should disclose. The president practices secrecy because he has so much to hide because he has done so many bad things. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, Donald Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Arguing for the motion is David Frum. He's a writer for The Atlantic and author of the New York Times bestseller Trumpocracy.

the corruption of the American Republic. Arguing against the motion is Kimberly Strassel, columnist at the Wall Street Journal, an author of the recent bestseller, Resistance at all costs. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Kimberly, on these abuses of power, one of the key kind of charges here that's being made

is that the president compromised national security, that by withholding the aid for that period of time, He undermined a stated U.S. objective to assist militarily the Ukrainian forces against a big geopolitical opponent of the United States of Vladimir Putin's Russia. What is the rebuttal to that particular charge, this compromising of national security? Let's remember what this aid was going for. It was going for lethal aid, javelins, to help Ukrainians. that was a policy Barack Obama did not pursue his entire time. It was a wise decision of Donald Trump's to increase and to change the nature of the aid we gave to provide lethal force. Now, there was a short delay of a couple of weeks in which the money did not flow. But even in a worst case scenario,

all we were doing was reverting to the policy that Barack Obama had of providing aid, not lethal aid. So again, if Donald Trump stands accused somehow, of endangering national security, Barack Obama stands accused of the same thing for a far longer period of time. And I would just like to go for a second to what David is really presenting here. He is suggesting that it is okay to remove a president on the basis of surmizal or conjecture. I mean, this is in no way the high bar. Again, he cannot point to any statute that has been broken. Democrats could not do it.

bribery, extortion, the Hobbs Act, none of those are mentioned in the articles of impeachment. Instead, we have this broad abuse of power and I would challenge people to think about how dangerous, a standard that is, going forward because it's in the eye of the beholder. Look, I could quite easily go back to the tenure of Barack Obama and I'm sure Republicans could come up with a dozen different acts that he took that they would consider an abuse of power. Should he have been removed from that? No Republicans suggested so at the time, but this is the path we're headed on if these amorphous articles are allowed to stand in this case. Richard Nixon, Article 3 of the Articles of Impeaching Richard Nixon, which he resigned

rather than face. Article 3 was abuse of power for refusing to comply with law subpoenas of the House of Representatives. But there were other statutes that were named. But Donald Trump has certainly broken laws. I mean, extortion is illegal. Yes, but he's not accused of extortion. But he did it. That's the abuse of power. Well, then why was it not named?

Look, this is a literary argument. What you're saying is, I don't like the way that the House of Representatives wrote the description of what happened. Well, okay. I mean, you know, everyone's a critic. And, you know, we all would write things differently if we wrote them certain ways. No, I just, I don't like the... That is what the impeachment is a different way.

about the abuse of power is the extortion. In all three times prior in impeachment, specific statutes were named for the high crimes and misdemeanors for which were being alleged. The fact that the Democrats here did not list any crimes as put forward in statutes is because they did not have the evidence to do so. This is why we got abuse of power. This is why we got contempt of Congress. Never before have those definitions ever been used in an impeachment hearing because in the past, we did, did conduct these proceedings in such a way that the American people could understand how they related to an actual crime. Andrew Johnson was not impeached for violating a criminal statute. He was impeached for violating a law. I didn't say a criminal statute. I said a statute.

That we actually probably people that we would all now agree and people at the time largely agreed was probably unconstitutional. And that was also done in a strict party line vote because the real reason Andrew Johnson was impeached was not for firing Edwin Stanton and violating the tenure of Loafas Act. He was impeached because what the Americans of the time perceived was that he was using presidential power to remake Southern governments in such a way as to assure his own election by disenfranchising Black Americans and rapidly pardoning former rebels against the United States government. So in that case, Johnson's opponents formulated a pretty narrow impeachment to deal with a very big evil, which is his willingness to disenfranchise Black Americans to

secure his own reelection. So impeachments as political matters, they're not legal. They're not legal. They're not courts of law. In the case of Bill Clinton, one of the reasons that is such a complicated case is he certainly broke a law, a law in perjury and organizing perjury. There's a question of how high a crime it was. And I think we could have maybe an interesting discussion about that precedent. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be at Resolved, Donald Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion to geopolitics to the future of human progress all on our website bunkdebates.com. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. I want to end on the fact that this is 2020. This fall, Kimberly, you will have an election. Donald Trump will stand before American voters.

So for the benefit of the audience, connect back that event with your argument. today as to why this impeachment you believe is a threat to America's democratic culture and its institutions because that's something, you know, David's written a lot about and cares a lot about also. You just seem to have come to this view of the state of those institutions through the lens of President Trump's presidency in very different ways. It's the entire argument. We are now only 10 months away from the American people going back to the polls. They will make their own judgment on Donald Trump, whether or not he has done something in his office that deserves his removal. And for the House of Representatives to, in essence,

overrule that process or preempt that process is a better word, by moving forward with an impeachment, it's a disservice to our system of elections. It's a disservice to our system of elections. It's a disservice to voters. David? In every poll, a plurality, and in some polls, a majority of the American people do support the removal of President Trump from office. That's one of the important ways that this case is so different from the Clinton case when Clinton consistently had public opinion on his side. Donald Trump does not. Now, that the majority or the plurality or maybe majority in favor of removal is not so big as to force the Senate's hand against its will, but it certainly removes the idea that the American people are in some ways reluctant participants in this.

If you ask them, they want them removed and we'll see what they do in November of 2020. I say this is someone, by the way, who wrote often against proceeding with impeachment until the Ukrainian matter broke. I thought it was unlikely to be successful and would, it was precipitate and premature. Donald Trump is not a strategic mastermind. Most criminals aren't. But he is shrewd enough and lawless enough to do things that call into question whether or not. not were going to have a fair election. And it is important now because Donald Trump's behavior changes his defenders. And it's made people defend things that they would have, the same people

would, I mean, it is inconceivable that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and so many of President Trump's defenders in the Senate would ever have tolerated any of this behavior, anything like it in any other administration, maybe not even in any other Republican administration. He's changing the country as he goes and putting down a market that says we remain America, the law remains the law, the rules remain the rules, that's worth doing, even if in the end it does not lead to the removal to the president, but only to his disgrace and then defeat in November. Great. Let's go to closing statements. Kimberly, let's have your summation. Well, I do agree with David on this, that impeachment is a political tool. And therefore, the measure of its success is whether or not you convince a sizable bipartisan majority of the, country of the necessity of removing a president from office. Democrats have utterly failed on that point. David talked about a plurality. If that's the best you can get, it's a big problem. And it's in stark contrast to our prior impeachments. I would note that when the House voted

to move forward to investigate Nixon on articles of impeachment, the vote was 410 to 4. and even when the House voted in 1998 to look into the impeachment of Bill Clinton, 31 Democrats joined with Republicans to do that. Mr. Frum continues to say that it's just inconceivable that guys like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio should be tolerating things like this. It seems not to have even occurred to critics of Donald Trump that maybe the case really is that weak. and maybe just sound-minded people feel that this is the latest in a long line of attempts to remove a president who was duly elected and who has been railroaded through an impeachment proceeding that bears no relation to anything in the past. The measure, again, of high crimes and misdemeanors, the reason that we expect there to be

actual crimes proven is because it is fundamental to convincing Americans that this is a step worth taking. And the fact that Democrats have been unable to do that, again, I posit sets a very, very damaging precedent for impeachment in the future. I do not want a future in this country where every time you have a president of one power and a House of Representatives of the opposing party, that the first place we go is impeachment. That is the precedent that is being set here. The bar needs to be higher and we risk doing damage for generations to come. Kimberly, thank you. A masterful summation there. David, we're going to give you the last word. The core evil that the impeachment power was designed to address back in 1787 was a president using the power of the presidency to solicit, extract benefits for himself from foreign powers.

Back then, the United States was weak and poor. Now it is great and powerful. And so the bribery takes a somewhat different form. Instead of receiving a bribe, the president now has the the power to go extract it and extort it. And that's what Donald Trump tried to do. I don't expect that Donald Trump will be removed. And as Kimberly Strassel says, this has not been a bipartisan process. That's not a mark in Donald Trump's favor. That's a mark of disgrace to a Republican Party that I'm still a member of that should be willing to uphold against Donald Trump, what it appelled against a much lesser offense in the case of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The precedent that is in danger of being set is not a precedent of casual impeachment. The precedent that's in danger of being set is that a party with a guilty president will put its party interests ahead of obvious

national interests and defend someone whom every or almost every member of the Republican caucus in private will describe as a criminal. If we're on a secret ballot, I wonder how many Republican votes there would be to convict. It's not a secret ballot, so they're frightened and they're behaving ill. But that is no excuse for the rest of us. to believe ill and to think ill just because they act ill. History will judge them harshly. And I think that the full truth of all of the criminality that occurred in the Trump administration, that too will emerge in time.

David Kimberly, this podcast is all about bringing back the art of public debate. You've both done that in spades today. And I just want to thank you on behalf of the Munk Foundation. This, again, is a really difficult, contentious topic. But both of you have addressed it in our time to get. with insight, knowledge, and a willingness to listen to one another. So thank you again. Really appreciate it. Thank you. It's been great. Thanks, David. Thanks, Roder. Thank you, Kim, bye. Bye, bye. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants. You certainly gave us a

lot to think about on a controversial and important issue. The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion to geopolitics to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate along with a full transcript. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers.

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