Today, Explained - Articles of impeachment

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

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Ukraine, Ukraine Explained. It's Ukraine Explained. Andrew Prokop, Vox, today is a solemn day. It's a solemn day for a solemn act, in Nancy Pelosi's opinion. On this solemn day, I recall that the first order of business for members of Congress is the solemn act to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. And that act is to introduce the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. And she quickly passed the baton to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, who became only the fourth person in the history of our nation

to present articles of impeachment against a sitting president. Today, in service to our duty to the Constitution and to our country, the House Committee on the Judiciary is introducing two articles of impeachment charging the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, with committing high crimes and misdemeanors. One, abuse of power, and two, obstruction of Congress. Let's start with Article 1, abuse of power. It is an impeachable offense for the president to exercise the powers of his public office to obtain an improper personal benefit while ignoring or injuring the national interest. Article one, abuse of power, it focuses on the basic facts of the Ukraine scandal, which in the view of Democrats boils down to this,

that President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States presidential election, and that he did so by urging Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm his opponent's political prospects, and that as part of this pressure campaign, he attempted to condition two official U.S. government acts that Ukraine wanted on whether they would announce these investigations. That's the White House meeting with the president of Ukraine and President Trump and the $391 million in military aid for Ukraine. Second article, obstruction of Congress, not of justice, but of Congress.

Yes. So this in the Democrats framing at the press conference was what President Trump did once he got caught. When the House investigated and opened an impeachment inquiry, President Trump engaged in unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of the impeachment inquiry. And according to Article 2, he did so in a manner offensive to and subversive of the Constitution. So specifically, the article points out three things that Trump did. He directed the White House to defy a lawful subpoena by withholding the production of documents sought by the committees.

He also, number two, directed other executive branch agencies and offices to defy lawful subpoenas and withhold documents. That's the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget, the Energy Department, and the Defense Department. And finally, third, Trump directed current and former executive branch officials not to cooperate with the committees, in response to which nine administration officials defied subpoenas for testimony. The article lists all nine names,

the most famous of which is Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff. What happened to bribery? There was so much talk about bribery, articles about bribery, entire podcast episodes about bribery. One reason that bribery came up so often is that the Constitution states that a president can be impeached for treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. But Democrats may have concluded that this didn't fit so cleanly with the colloquial understanding of bribery, which is Trump handing a sack of money to someone. somewhat similar to that, but they evidently felt they were on firmer ground framing the Ukraine stuff as an abuse of power, not as bribery. And the Mueller report, there was talk in the past few weeks about stuff from the Mueller report coming back into these articles of

impeachment that didn't end up happening. Yeah, as recently as yesterday, there was still talk of a potential third article of impeachment, one that would be about obstruction of justice. And that one would have focused on conduct outlined in the Mueller report, specifically Trump's effort to get the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to create a false paper trail for him is one specific instance Democrats wanted to focus on. But again, they thought they had a clean argument here about the Ukraine scandal and about Trump's attempts to cover up and obstruct the inquiry into the Ukraine scandal and then bringing up this ancient history that happened, you know, oh, a year ago, two years ago, that would be too tough a political sell. Before this press conference wrapped up, Adam Schiff spoke. What did he have to say?

So Schiff addressed a question that has been posed to Democrats pretty frequently lately. Now, some would argue, why don't you just wait? Why don't you just wait until you get these witnesses the White House refuses to produce? Why don't you just wait until you get the documents the White House refuses to turn over? their investigation, trying to pursue lawsuits in the court to unearth more documents, get more witness testimony, and get more facts about what actually happened here. And people should understand what that argument really means. It has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling that Don McGahn has no absolute right to defy Congress. Eight months for one court decision. And Schiff's response was that Trump essentially tried to cheat to win the 2020 election in his view with this effort to make this deal with Ukraine. And that if they waited, it's essentially letting Trump get away with cheating and that they couldn't do that.

Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time? That is what that argument amounts to. I guess we know how Republicans feel about this whole process from their performance yesterday in the House Judiciary Committee. Did President Trump respond this morning? President Trump offered a few tweets. One simply reads, Witch Hunt, all capital letters, exclamation point. Another, he said that Nadler just said that I pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 election. Ridiculous. And he knows that is not true.

Both the president and foreign minister of Ukraine said many times that there was no pressure. Nadler and the Dems know this, but refuse to acknowledge. Later this week, the Judiciary Committee will meet to consider these articles of impeachment and to make a recommendation to the full House of Representatives. So what comes next? The Judiciary Committee has a large Democratic majority of very liberal Democrats. So this vote is a done deal. Both of these articles are surely going to be approved out of the Judiciary Committee. Then, of course, the big question is how many votes they will get on the House floor. And that

vote is expected next week. I wonder what that vote will sound like, Andrew. The clerk will call the roll. I'm guessing it will sound something like this. Mr. Nadler. Aye. Mr. Nadler votes aye. Mr. Richmond. Yes. Mr. Richmond votes yes. Mr. Jeffries. Aye. Mr. Jeffries votes aye. Mr. it will sound something like this. Mr. Correa? Aye. Mr. Correa votes aye. Ms. Scanlon? Aye. Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Ms. Garcia? Aye. Ms. Garcia votes aye. Mr. Neguse? Aye. Mr. Neguse votes aye. Mr. Collins? No. Mr. Collins votes no. Mr. Shabbat? No. Mr. Shabbat votes no. Mr. McClintock? No. Mr. McClintock votes no. Ms. Lesko? No. Ms. Lesko votes no. Mr. Reschenthaler? No. Mr. Reschenthaler votes no. Mr. Klein? No. Mr. Klein votes no. Mr. Armstrong? No. Mr. Armstrong votes no. Mr. Stubbe? No. Mr. Stubbe votes no. The motion to the table is agreed to. I gotta hand it to Quip for their latest marketing campaign here. They're making the argument that if you ask a dentist what toothbrush to buy, that said dentist will tell you it's less about the brush and more about how you use it.

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So that's been the big question. I would call this the minimum viable impeachment product, right? You have abuse of power, which is fundamentally what Donald Trump has done, using the power of his office to further his own domestic political ends. That is abuse of power in the specific way the founders contemplated it. Then you have obstruction. And I would note that obstruction is here both in a direct way. Donald Trump has been keeping the key witnesses from testifying before the House, which in a way nullifies the impeachment power. But it's also in some ways a rebuttal to a Republican argument you've been hearing, which is that, well, we've not done enough fact-finding. We've not heard from enough people.

And the point of this article as well is to say, well, yeah, we could do more fact-finding and hear from more people if the president was not refusing to participate in the process and thereby short-circuiting congressional oversight. It sounds like you were expecting what you heard this morning. Was there anything in the written version that surprised you? I wouldn't say it surprised me. The thing I do want to call out, though, the impeachment articles are nine pages long. If you go to the fifth page, you go to the second paragraph on the fifth page, there's something that the Democrats say that I think is key to this whole situation. They write, President Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. I think there's a way to look at impeachment where you're understanding it fundamentally as punishment, right?

You're drawing an analogy to, I don't know, a court case. He did something and it's being punished. But to think about that analogy in a broader way, impeachment in the way Democrats are framing it here, is preventive. You are trying to keep somebody who is shown they will abuse the powers of office in order to further their own political and personal goals from being able to do that again. And Donald Trump, who clearly did some version of this in the Mueller case, very much clearly did obstruction in the Mueller case, publicly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails after everything that happened in the Mueller case. After all the investigating and the press coverage and the attacks and Trump shouting that it was a witch hunt, he turned around and did exactly what he was accused of

there with Ukraine. And now there's no argument. He really did use the power of his office to try to collude or in another version, extort a foreign government to help him win the next election. So what we see here is a pattern of behavior. And if Donald Trump is allowed to skate out of this, if he is allowed to get by without any kind of punishment, sanction, or removal, there's no reason to think that he will not do this and worsen this again. And to keep somebody from doing it again, that is the constitutional portion of impeachment. That is why it is there to protect the country from that kind of behavior. But everyone in this process is certain that the Republicans are going to acquit the president.

So if this was meant to be a reminder of consequences of actions or even punishment, as you say, if acquitted, will the president feel that consequence, that punishment? I don't know. He certainly won't feel to the extent he would if he was not acquitted. It is hard to say what to do when you have one political party short-circuiting accountability in government. It's hard to say what to do when the constitutional structure is breaking down because it was not designed for parties. You cannot have a two-party political system that is functional if one party has become dysfunctional. There just isn't an answer that works in that structure. So I don't have a good answer for you on that. What I will say is that while acquittal as opposed

to removal gives Donald Trump at least – lets him retain the power to act in these ways again. By the same token, nobody wants to be the third president in American history to be impeached, right? Nobody wants to be, it's Andrew Johnson, it's Bill Clinton, and then me. And Richard Nixon, of course, resigned before he was impeached, but he would have been. So add Nixon to the list, at least spiritually. So there is a punishment here. Impeachment is going to be one of many parts of the Donald Trump presidency that gives it a black mark in history. And Donald Trump at different times has actually said that. He's said he doesn't want this to happen. I'll also say that particularly for the election, because remember, this is the first

impeachment in modern times that is happening in a president's first term. Clinton and Nixon are both in the second term. So they weren't going to face the voters again. Donald Trump will face the voters again. Right. And his popularity remains mostly unfazed by this, at least with his base. But you and I have talked about that before. I wonder, since this is a big,

momentous occasion for our country, as you pointed out, this has only happened four times, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, and now Trump. How did our republic look today in the big bright lights? It looks bad. This isn't just about Donald Trump. What we've had here is almost like a, it's a test of the system, right? Like we pulled a fire alarm. When it's really easy to hear, when you know what's going on, when you can't deny it anymore, will we evacuate the building? And the answer was no. Or at least the answer looks like

it will ultimately be no. And so, yes, to the extent this is a test, to the extent this is something that future generations or other countries are looking at American government and asking, how does it perform under stress? The answer is it really doesn't. So this whole process hasn't made you feel like, okay, there is some accountability in our system? No. Imagine Democrats hadn't won a huge landslide victory in 2018. So there would have been none of this, number one.

There would have been no impeachment hearings, no oversight coming out of House Republicans. You think Devin Nunes' committee would have investigated Donald Trump over this? So one, you see right there, there's no automatic nature to our oversight. There is no Congress will keep the executive in check because that is Congress's job, no matter who is running it. Then imagine, what if Donald Trump weren't so crude about all of it? What if he just left it to his underlings? What if instead of on his phone call with the Ukrainian president saying repeatedly, just to be clear, you will investigate Joe Biden for these Javelin missiles,

right? Joe Biden. Do you hear me? Joe Biden. What if he hadn't done that? What if he just said, you're going to take care of the corruption problems, right? Like you've talked about with my team. And the Ukrainian president said, sure. There's a lot of evidence that the Ukrainian president was getting ready to go on CNN to make this announcement. The scheme almost worked. To some degree, it may still work, right? It may still harm Joe Biden while not really leading to any true consequence for Donald Trump. I mean, except for a public opinion consequence, maybe. What if Donald Trump were just more capable about all of it? What if the people he hired were more capable? Does anything about this process make you think we have a defense for

that? I mean, we were so close to just working all out, right? Just us waking up one morning, and on A1, we just see an article, Ukrainian government investigating Joe and Hunter Biden, right? That's it, right? And then they'll be like, oh, well, Joe Biden, right? Corruption, it's terrible. And it just would have been the same thing. It was so close to working. And maybe other things are working, right? So, this has been a test that we're failing. You can imagine the history books that look at this and say, oh, you can see there the rot that was taking over the party, right? If like the fall of America is written in the future, I'm not saying that it will be because of Donald Trump. I don't think it

will be. But I do think that our political system is showing a kind of strain and stress and inability to respond to its current conditions that has often in other countries been the prelude to true crisis. As Recline hosts Impeachment Explained, episodes come out every Saturday, and you can be sure he'll discuss these two articles of impeachment further on this week's episode. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Ukraine Explained.