"He can run but he can't hide,"
-- Joe Louis, heavyweight champion, 1946.
Congress should follow strict rules and time-honored precedents in its impeachment investigation, the president insists. They should also adopt new methods he thinks are fair.
Listening to President Donald Trump, his lawyers and his cheering section insist on protocols they just made up while claiming historical knowledge gave me the best laugh I had all week. No one had less respect for or knowledge of proper form than them. Then a real fight started, and they needed something to hide behind.
"Trump University Law School Graduates," to use one wit's phrase, list lots of actions Congress should take. There is no such list in the real world. This is not complicated. The House has the power of impeachment. It is in the Constitution -- briefly. There are so few restraints, the House does not even have to have hearings.
I could quote law professors on this, but the knife fight scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid illustrates the point more vividly:
Butch: "No, no. Not yet. Not until me and Harvey get the rules straightened out."
Harvey: "Rules -- in a knife fight?"
Butch kicks Harvey in the groin.
"No rules. If there ain't any rules, let's get started. Someone count 1, 2, 3, go."
The core question of the impeachment investigation is this: Does the House have enough public support to keep going? Yes, it does with a plurality among independents, the near-unanimous backing of Democrats and even a small segment of Republicans.
How much times have changed. Republicans had all the popular support they would ever need in 2016. They went from that to an embattled minority in three years. Trump is why. He fights with his mouth and his twittering thumbs.
The only punches he lands in this impeachment fight are on himself, in the face. For example, he called on China to investigate his most-feared political rival -- while under impeachment scrutiny for trying to force the Ukraine to investigate his most-feared political rival.
The president orders his underlings not to testify or provide documents to Congress. He might as well have told them to plead the Fifth while pleading the Fifth himself. Just ordering people to not testify and to hide documents is an impeachable offense.
Trump claims Democrats are out to get him. Wow. No kidding. Perhaps he should stop handing out sticks for them to beat him with.
He either stonewalled or slow-walked every request Congress made for years before all this. He let lawyers -- government, taxpayer-paid lawyers -- fight his battles for him in the courts. He finally went too far with Ukraine. The House picked up the impeachment hammer because nothing else works. Trump then boo-hooed that using a hammer is unfair.
The 2016 Republican presidential primary was not a fight. Trump won with his mouth. No one even demanded to see his tax returns. They let that "Mexico will pay for the wall" nonsense slide. Trump did not even have to win a majority of the primary vote in many states to get all their delegates. He arrived at the convention with a plurality and got the nomination.
Trump won the presidency because he had an "R" beside his name and was not Hillary Clinton. He also won because of the scoring method, giving him the biggest popular vote loss of any winning candidate. Yes, the only statistic that counts is on the scoreboard, but a more popular president might have taken longer to slide this far.
His party's majority in Congress put up with anything he did for the first two years. He still lost the Obamacare repeal fight. He claims he is winning the "build the wall" fight, but he is not. Then his party lost the House. Even then, the opposition party did not step into the ring and call his bluffs until someone blew the whistle on Ukraine.
We need someone who fights, Trump's supporters have said since 2015. They never found one. I do not know what Trump fans were looking for in a fighter. In my not-so-great and easily surpassed wisdom, I think they should have looked for someone who had been in a fight before. Having won one would have been good, too.
Too late now. Welcome to the jungle.
Commentary on 10/12/2019