Excerpt: "Protecting voting rights is an essential step that Biden must take to repair our democracy. But it is only the first one."
Joe Biden. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
30 September 20
Protecting voting rights is an essential step that Biden must take to repair our democracy. But it is only the first one.
onald Trump, both in his own behavior and in the policies of his Administration, has waged war on the rule of law. The tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic has absorbed the nation’s attention for most of 2020, so it’s easy to forget that Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives less than a year ago––and that he deserved to be. Trump’s withholding of congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine, in an attempt to extract from its government damaging information and propaganda about the Biden family, was precisely the kind of offense that the Framers intended impeachment to address. Trump’s defiance of Congress’s right to investigate his wrongdoing was another proper ground for his removal.
Trump’s Ukraine misadventure followed the conduct that the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III detailed in his report about the 2016 campaign and its aftermath. The Mueller report, now an even more distant memory, suggested that the President committed repeated acts of criminal obstruction of justice, which were at least as serious as those which led to Richard Nixon’s resignation. The failure of the Ukraine scandal or the Mueller investigation to bring about Trump’s removal speaks more to the craven state of the contemporary Republican Party, which has blindly supported its leader, than to the evident merits of the case against him.
