David Corn: With This Impeachment, Trump Is Getting Off Easy

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/with-this-impeachment-trump-is-getting-off-easy/

11 mins ago
With This Impeachment, Trump Is Getting Off Easy
There’s so much more than Ukraine.
David Corn

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There are other major Trump transgressions that Democrats as a whole have not seriously pondered for impeachment. Trump has blatantly violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits a president from accepting payments from a foreign state. Yet through his hotels and businesses, Trump has pocketed large amounts of money from governments and businesses overseas. He has committed this crime against the Constitution in plain sight. There have been lawsuits filed and some congressional criticism, but no turn toward impeachment as the remedy. (Trump’s trashing of this constitutional command is in sync with the rampant conflicts-of-interest and nepotism that flow throughout his administration and with his steadfast refusal to release his tax returns.)

And let’s not forget his illegal hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, which was made to keep the story of her liaison with Trump from affecting the 2016 election–and which eventually landed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in a federal prison. (Cohen also was convicted of lying to Congress about Trump’s secret attempt during the 2016 campaign to negotiate a deal to develop a tower project in Moscow—an endeavor that Trump hid from the voters and that included his company asking Putin’s office for assistance.) A filing in the Cohen case noted that Trump “directed” Cohen to make the illegal pay-offs to Daniels and another woman. The president of the United States—a.k.a. “Individual 1?—was essentially named as a co-conspirator in a criminal case. That, too, could be worthy of an impeachment debate.

Much is rotten within the Trump presidency that could trigger the ultimate political punishment. But rather than throw a long buffet table of wrongdoing at the public, the Democrats resolved to present one easy-to-digest plate. As of now, the wisdom of this strategy has not been fully tested. Facing this strategy, ranting Republicans have deployed diversions, have denied basic facts, have decried the streamlined process, and have belittled the Ukraine case as not momentous enough for the most extreme verdict in politics. They have not had to confront the many other grievous offenses and malfeasances of Trump. It’s unlikely the Republicans’ tactics would be much different were they contending with a wider impeachment case. But they have the luxury of training their fire on a narrower target, as Trump attempts to trivialize this impeachment vote, as grave and weighty as it is, as nothing but petty politics.

In a way, Trump’s impeachment is like a Russian nesting doll—except in reverse. Usually, one starts with the largest doll and opens it to find a smaller one, which contains a smaller one, which contains a smaller one, and so on. Trump may be fortunate that this impeachment starts with—and is being fought over—one of the smaller dolls. But that doll does not stand on its own. It is the nub of larger corruptions that just might be too big for the political system to handle.