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Trump Impeachment: The Fatal Weakness of the Democrats’ Case

Yesterday The Atlantic ran my article on the impeachment saga. The fatal weakness in the Democrats’ case for impeachment, I argue, is that from the start they have presupposed, as established fact, the very proposition to be proved, namely that President Trump acted with corrupt intent. That’s why they alleged a bunch of actions that all had a plausible legitimate governmental purpose, and walked away believing that they made a solid case. As my friend Jeremy Rabkin of GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School puts, the Democrats’ argument boils down to “This must be lawless behavior because Trump is the sort of guy who would behave lawlessly.”

In the end, the Democrats proved nothing. From my article:

The House Democrats launched the impeachment proceedings because of their unshakable conviction that the president is corrupt and unfit for office. But that is just a character judgment, and Republicans don’t share it. After nearly three years, even some Republicans who were originally “Never Trump” seem to have concluded that despite his flaws, the president is basically a well-intentioned person trying to do what’s right for the country, and, whatever his flaws, they are far from the ghoulish caricature of Democrats’ imagining. To convict, Republicans will need more than the thin allegations and even thinner evidence the Democrats have to show for their three-year-long exercise in phantasmagoria.

Read the rest here.

Mario Loyola — Mr. Loyola, a former foreign-policy adviser at the Pentagon and in the U.S. Senate, is a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.