Anyone who doubts there’s much voter appetite for the Donald Trump impeachment inquiry only need look at the flip-flop by Hawaii congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard after she initially opposed the House probe.
Gabbard, who’s the favorite Democrat of many Trump loyalists and reluctant to offend them, rejected impeachment proceedings after Trump first released a transcript of his phone call pressuring Ukraine’s president to investigate Gabbard’s fellow Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son.
“Most people reading through that transcript are not going to find that extremely compelling cause to throw out a president that won an election in 2016,” Gabbard said in a view that ran contrary to Hawaii’s three other congressional delegates and most presidential candidates.
She said impeachment would further divide the country and fanned talk in far-right media that it would lead to civil war.
Gabbard quickly reversed herself after getting an apparent earful from voters on the campaign trail.
“Unfortunately,” she reconsidered, “I believe that if we do not proceed with the inquiry … future presidents, as well as anyone in positions of power in the government, will conclude that they can abuse their position for personal gain, without fear of accountability or consequences.”
Some are understandably leery of impeachment proceedings a year before a presidential election, but we have a president who’s increasingly unscrupulous and unhinged in abusing his power for personal and political gain and to punish his adversaries. He accepts no limits to his authority and thinks he can do as he pleases with impunity.
After thumbing his nose at indisputable evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election and plans for an encore next year, Trump brazenly solicited more illegal foreign interference by pressuring Ukraine and China to dig up dirt on Biden, his chief 2020 threat.
His Justice and State departments endanger our national security and integrity as they perversely pursue Trump’s old vendettas against Hillary Clinton and intelligence agencies involved in the Russia probe.
He’s run a shadow foreign policy based on wacky conspiracy theories through his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, fired career diplomats and attorneys who wouldn’t play ball, and engaged in increasingly delusional and self-pitying rants in which he’s demanded a congressional critic be arrested for treason and likened a patriotic whistleblower to a spy who should be executed.
We must loudly declare this is not OK before it becomes the norm, and impeachment is the tool our Constitution provides to address egregious misbehavior the president insists on escalating.
Whether or not the inquiry ends in Trump’s removal from office, Congress is compelled to build a factual record of what is occurring and defend our democracy.
Enough voters are alarmed that even the calculating Gabbard had to recognize the gravity of the moment.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
