The Republican defense of President Trump on impeachment is easy, a snap. It requires no mention of the president's actual deed, which is convenient since its inappropriateness is factually uncontroverted.
All a Republican must do is say that the Democrats were determined from the outset to impeach Trump for any old thing that came along. Then the Republican might add that the Democrats set up a kangaroo system that predetermined impeachment and then worked backward.
Unusually for a Republican talking point, that latter assertion rings true. It's the reason the impeachment process is fraught with political peril for the Trump resistance. It's one reason I'd prefer consideration of a censure motion.
Censure would require Republicans to say a simple yea or nay on the core substance--on whether they think it's fine for a president to enlist a foreign government to run domestic political interference for him.
For a bonus rhetorical flourish, the Republican might opine that the country needs to get back to important business, including the presidential election that the Democrats are trying to influence, as if they also aren't, and as if Trump isn't.
For good measure, the Republican can always say Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler. That's all. Just say those names.
Saying Obama and Hillary works generally, but neither of them has anything to do with the current specific of impeachment.
Even so, a naturally unsteady Republican can still manage to stumble, which was the case with chronically wobbly Arkansas GOP chairman Doyle Webb in a television interview over the weekend.
He got asked if he would have any objection if Joe Biden was revealed as president trying to get a foreign government to investigate one of his political opponents. It's a trick question. It seeks to force the Republican respondent to consider the president's transgression.
What a deft Republican would do in such a situation is say that the question is pointlessly hypothetical and that the real issue remains the biased Democratic impeachment when there's real business to be done.
See? I could be a stellar Republican, with my brain tied behind my back.
But Webb replied that we haven't really established that Trump indeed tried to get a foreign government to investigate one of his opponents. The incredulous interviewer said, "It's in the call summary," to which Webb shot back that well, uh, as he was saying, this action--whatever it was--doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
Meantime, we behold the operative responses of the state's four soul-mortgaged Republican members of the House.
Rick Crawford thinks this entire impeachment matter is such nonsense that he gave up his integral committee seat investigating it so that Jim Jordan could be on TV.
Steve Womack says it's "sad" that the Democrats are reduced to such dastardliness that will assuredly blow up on them in the next election.
Bruce Westerman says ... something ... let me see if I can find it. Here it is: Well, it's mainly the aforementioned standard Republican apologia with the added personal touch of calling impeachment a "circus."
He also makes a curious inclusion of "health care" among the serious matters to which we must return our attention. Doing away with guaranteed insurance coverage for persons with pre-existing conditions would seem to be the last thing Republicans would want to talk about right now.
Of course, I'm reminded that Westerman, as a state representative, accused fellow Republicans of being Judases for voting to extend health insurance to poor people.
That leaves French Hill, whom I continue to find the least superficial of our soul-mortgaged delegation. On this issue he uses more words, but also one more thought.
Hill adds this point: A serious, fair-minded Democratic response to the whistle-blower allegations would have been to conduct oversight hearings in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, seeking information as a foundation for appropriate action rather than rushing to declare "impeachment inquiry" first and then investigate second.
I simply have to agree.
The Foreign Affairs Committee could have systematically revealed the case for impeachment--or censure--on the pretext of congressional oversight. But the Intelligence Committee ran on a fully loaded tank of impeachment adrenaline, with chairman Adam Schiff sitting as judge while giving a prosecutor's closing argument every day.
That's a little like Wendell Griffin issuing a death penalty ruling and then going out and participating in a protest against the death penalty. The main difference is that Schiff went ahead and did his protesting while on the bench.
For the record: There's one other Republican defense of Trump. It's that he wasn't trying to influence the next election with his favor-seeking from Ukraine; it's that he instead was continuing to fight from his old resentments of the intimation that he didn't fairly win the last one.
That's a distinction wrapped so deeply in the vast presidential ego that it is without a difference.
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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 [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/17/2019