t’s my nature.”
That’s what TV’s mob boss Tony Soprano once said with a shrug when he was asked how he could take advantage of an old high school buddy who made the mistake of doing business with him.
It’s kind of like the stories that come along every few years of someone gladhanding a tiger only to be disappointed when big kitty sees them more as a Happy Meal than a friend: You can only be so mad at the tigers.
The same is true of Trump. The guy’s past indiscretions are a mile long. It’s his nature to lie, cheat, steal, you name it, large or small—there are no limits. If it benefits Trump, he’ll violate the standards of decency that constrain most human beings.
Unfortunately, we thought it would be a good idea to make this guy our President, with both his fans and foes wishing he would somehow change when he was in the Oval Office.
Nope.
He’s the same old Trump. And during his first two and a half years, he’s done dozens of things that would have led to impeachment or own-party demands for resignation in previous administrations. But somehow, with each offense, he becomes more inoculated.
Now the impeachment murmurs have erupted into a scream amid revelations that the President pressured a foreign leader to dig up dirt on one of Trump’s political rivals. That one, even in the mind of the previously overcautious Nancy Pelosi, was a bridge too far.
“The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the President’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi declared, throwing her support behind an impeachment inquiry. “The President must be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
More than 200 members of Congress, all Democrats except for one independent, now support an impeachment inquiry.
The time to dump Trump is now. The country is ready for it. For those on the right as well as the left, it’s good politics. It’s a way for some Republicans to avoid being pegged as a cult of personality around Trump. (Yes, Trump really could stand out on Fifth Avenue and start shooting people and still be wildly popular among his base. “It’s so refreshing to see a President take the law into his own hands,” his followers would say.)
For those Democrats who are still not woke to the necessity of impeachment, remember that you took an oath to “defend the Constitution.” And the Constitution stipulates that members of Congress “be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution.” There is no reference to anything else.
A 2017 article in Smithsonian magazine recounts how founding father George Mason, the author of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, was a key proponent of including an impeachment clause in the Constitution. When some argued against it, saying a misbehaving President could always be voted out, Mason laid out a specific example of where a presidential candidate might bribe electors to illegitimately win the presidency.
“Shall any man be above justice?” Mason asked. “Shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice? Shall the man who has practiced corruption, and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment by repeating his guilt?”
In the case of Trump, as clearly laid out in the Mueller report and fortified by the latest revelations, not only has he “practiced corruption,” but he’s been caught practicing it again and again. Now he’s been caught using the power of his office to push the new president of Ukraine to gather dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, who might quite possibly be Trump’s 2020 opponent.
The question is no longer whether impeachment is a good idea. It’s about whether the members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, will follow their oath of office to defend the Constitution.
