I have been arguing for awhile now that the White House, congressional Republicans, and Trump-friendly punditocracy alike ought to alter their predominant impeachment defense narrative. The “no quid pro quo” narrative amounts to tendentious semantic debate: Its ability to persuade is largely cabined, in Rorschach test-like fashion, to the universe of voters already predisposed toward Trump sympathy. It is preferable to make a substantive argument that attaching corruption-related strings to the doling out of politically unpopular U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid simply does not rise to an “abuse or violation of some public trust,” as Alexander Hamilton’s defined the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” impeachment criterion in The Federalist No. 65.
But it is possible that there is an even more straightforward and politically palatable impeachment defense that does not necessarily entail accepting a certain view of foreign policy or foreign aid. The defense revolves around the nexus of political quid pro quos and constitutionally protected free speech.
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