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Go ahead and impeach, if only because democracy demands it

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

It was a week that began with President Donald Trump appearing to face no possibility of being impeached. It ended with impeachment appearing to be assured.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill. This is your democracy, once again facing a constitutional crisis that will test the ability of our institutions to endure.

While some see a partisan dispute that seems to have run amok, others see a great opportunity for ordinary people to take a stand for -- brace yourselves -- ethics in government, or something close to it. Leah Greenberg of the Indivisible Project stated a widely held sentiment to the Guardian: "This is what the 'blue wave' fought for," she said, "accountability for Trump's crimes."

And if anything drove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats over the brink, it was the dubious deals of their unifying foe, President Trump.

This was a week in which Trump suddenly appeared to risk losing a key constituency: those Americans who don't like to see their president hold up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, allocated by Congress, in order to pressure Ukraine's president into digging up dirt on a political rival back home in America.

That was the conspiracy revealed by an unnamed intelligence official who quickly became known simply as "the whistleblower."

 

This saga started gaining the public's attention with reports on CNN and in The Washington Post that Trump ordered a hold on millions in military aid to Ukraine. He did so roughly one week before he had a curious phone conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which was first reported by The Washington Post.

Under pressure to show some accountability, the White House released a memo detailing contents of the July phone call, in which Trump asked Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani have worked diligently to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and his Democratic presidential candidate father's conduct in Ukraine, not coincidentally as Joe Biden was leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he was involved in any lawbreaking in his work in Ukraine with the country's largest private gas company. But the old controversy is a great nothing burger for Trump to exploit. After all, Trump is the man who entered the political scene by promoting the bogus theory that Barack Obama wasn't really born in the United States. Doesn't Trump wish.

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(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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