I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)
The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly. As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society. We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now. As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut). (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)
I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing. What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department. (It's the other side, of course.) But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.
All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality. This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines. So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this. [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]
Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import. Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping. (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules. For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position. That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)
With that background, let's consider numerous facts:
By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.
It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW, - from Sean Hannity's show. Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points). As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer). And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report. (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)
So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves. And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved. It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere. According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him. Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated. The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better. And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.
But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this. He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it. Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines. Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress. But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster. Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is. From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.
That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense? Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting. Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party. (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.) Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election. (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment? I recommend carefully chewing over this question. Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him. (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed. How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?)) Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election." (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind. As I said, it seemed all too typical. [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])
I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office. At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability. For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3. I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president. Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020. (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.) My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.
And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this. Relevant points:
(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh. You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith? What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony? ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....) Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing? Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.
(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents. The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.
(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved. (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.) In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020. Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020. Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017. (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)
As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.
As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.
And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?
And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.). They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc. If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered. (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding? Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?) The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago. The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture. Plato is right. (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)
[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging. I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts. I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's. So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me. (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars. Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress." Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests. My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.) I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test. Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics. (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al? In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick. I liked that moment, as well.) The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes. Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward." And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties. The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid. (Elections are fast approaching, see. An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see. [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this. BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.]) Hence the "rushed" process in both instances. Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled? Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]
[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]
[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders. One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions. I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere. I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink. I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case. I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress. Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris. Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them. Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical. BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats. (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again." You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.) Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]
