The NYT Against Impeachment

Not the NYT itself, not as a corporate body, but they did publish an opinion piece against it. Good for them: it's more than I expected. It's a pretty good piece.

Mr. Trump’s opponents treat norms as if they were laws. But Mr. Trump openly campaigned in 2016 as someone who would rescind the nonlegal norms of American politics. He said he would “drain the swamp.” Washington’s traditional way of doing business, the legal but corrupt trade in money and influence, was something he was elected to attack. He has only contributed to the problem in the eyes of his critics, but for supporters the goal remains the same.

Mr. Trump was also elected to transform America’s foreign relations. The nation’s leadership in both parties and the Civil Service had embroiled the country in endless wars and a string of humiliations. That Mr. Trump considers officials serving in places like Ukraine to be part of the problem he was elected to solve is no secret. The testimony such officials have so far offered during impeachment hearings bears him out: Their view of American objectives is different from his....

Testimony at this week’s impeachment hearings from Gordon Sondland and other witnesses only underscores the point: President Trump believed it was right to call for Ukraine’s new president, elected on an anti-corruption agenda, to dig into and make public the links between his country, its government, its oligarchs and oil companies, and American political figures like the Bidens. The questions he was pursuing were bigger than the 2020 election.

If the investigations he was pursuing were reasonably indicated by the facts, it's not wrong to have asked for them even if it also benefits him politically (and then only in theory, contingent on the increasingly-unlikely success of Joe Biden in becoming his opponent). All of the witnesses this week agreed that the Hunter Biden matter created at least an appearance of conflict of interest; given Joe Biden's position as a high public official, and the direct relationship between himself and firing the man prosecuting his son's company, that seems correct. If there is a clear appearance of a conflict of interest, what could be more proper than to ask for it to be investigated to clear up whether there was wrongdoing? We have a treaty with Ukraine governing just that kind of investigation, one that was signed by Bill Clinton and that Joe Biden himself voted to ratify.

I hear Fiona Hill loud and clear when she says she was angry when she discovered that the President had set up a parallel process to her own integrated, complex interagency process -- one that was operating without coordinating with them and pursuing goals she and others in the interagency thought unwise and even against American interests. I can understand how that would make you angry. In Iraq once we found out accidentally that Division had sent a guy who reported directly to the Commanding General to meddle in a matter likely to produce violence in our AO, without anyone telling us or warning us. Of course we were understandably angry about that, and the complaint is a rational one -- in our case, it put our lives and our people's lives at risk, just through a lack of coordination. Anger is a reasonable response in such a case.

Nobody thought, though, that the Commanding General should be relieved over it. Clearly he had authority to do it. Clearly here, too, the President has authority to override the interagency, or even just to ignore the interagency. The chain of command does not place the consensus of the bureaucracies over the elected president. As the author of this piece says, too, this particular president was elected precisely on the argument that the bureaucracies needed to be drained of influence. That's what he said he was going to do if elected, and he was -- like it or not, and many of us would have preferred someone else, in my case Jim Webb. Our preferred candidates made arguments too, and they didn't win.

UPDATE: The Nation also publishes an article against.