Tomorrow will commence the third presidential impeachment trial in the history of the United States Senate. And on the eve of such a rare and solemn institutional undertaking, it is still not entirely clear what exactly President Donald Trump has done to deserve such a fate.
At the outset of this saga, House Democrats spent weeks promoting an oh-so nefarious “quid pro quo” that transpired during Trump’s now-infamous July 25 phone call last summer with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It turns out that abstruse Latinate didn’t poll-test well — and never mind that such a “quid pro quo,” when cabined to a public official’s lawful exercise of his constitutional authority, amounts to constitutionally protected free speech. Democrats next engaged in the hilariously public floating of bribery — which is actually enumerated as a presidential impeachment criterion in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution — before deciding that they simply lacked the grist to advance such a claim. Democrats ultimately settled on the mealy-mouthed, amorphous gibberish of “abuse of power” and the utterly nonsensical, constitutionally illiterate “obstruction of Congress” as their charges of choice.
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