The house intelligence committee released its impeachment inquiry report today. The full report is here. The report’s conclusions is what you would have expected if you followed and watched the inquiry.
The report is broken down into two sections. Section 1 speaks to Trump’s misconduct and section 2 speaks to his obstruction of the inquiry. The summarized conclusion of section 1 is:
As described in this executive summary and the report that follows, President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.
Simply based on this conclusion, the house committee could have referenced the matter for a vote on articles of impeachment. However, the committee didn’t leave the matter there, and also noted the administration’s refusal to cooperate as another reason for their conclusion.
In response, President Trump engaged in an unprecedented campaign of obstruction of this impeachment inquiry.
At this point, it is almost certain the house will vote on articles of impeachment and Trump will be only the 3rd President in history to share the dishonor. The matter will then be presented to Senate, which will try the President. It is only then, the Senate can vote to remove him from office.
This is the point of no-return for our democracy. There will only be two real outcomes:
- The Senate finds him guilty and removes him from office
- The whole thing becomes a spectacle and Trump not only remains in office, but uses the outcome as further proof that he’s untouchable
The latter will result in more pain than we can imagine. One of the dangers the founding fathers warned about was the breaking of our democracy into parties, into factions. They knew that such a breakdown would lead to an opportunist leader to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps this is as far as this so called “Experiment in democracy could last“. I certainly hope I’m wrong.
