[Sea Dangles]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

The charge that the president asked the government of Ukraine to give him personal political favors is serious. Proving it also requires overcoming presidential stonewalling, building a carefully-constructed case on the model of criminal law, and relying on dozens of Republicans to reverse positions they have already taken publicly.

Cipollone’s or Trump's letter to Congress is a game-changer precisely because it is not about the president’s conduct—which Democrats are always primed to attack and which Republicans are forever willing to excuse. It sweeps away the clutter of Trump’s outsized personality to clarify the constitutional stakes. The letter is not a constitutional crisis. It is a constitutional opportunity.

On the basis of Cipollone’s letter alone, the House could immediately debate articles of impeachment rooted in abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. That would clarify the question for Congressional Republicans, which is not whether they are willing to apologize ad infinitum for President Trump personally—they are—but rather whether they are willing to go on record as foregoing their power of oversight of future Democratic administrations. Democrats will eventually occupy the White House and Republicans will eventually control the Congress. Whether that happens in 2021 or beyond is not the point. The survival of congressional oversight is.

The stakes are no less than that. The important fact about the Cipollone letter is not that it concocts legal grounds for resisting the House inquiry but rather that it reserves for presidents the right to judge whether impeachment proceedings are legitimate. Is there a circumstance in which a future president would acknowledge that they are?

That those in power will someday find themselves in opposition—and consequently should make decisions on the integrity of institutions rather than the behavior of individuals—is both one of the most important, and one of the most easily forsaken, tenets of constitutionalism.

Democrats forgot that principle with respect to President Obama’s assertions of unilateral executive authority over domestic issues such as health care and immigration. Yet some of the president’s most shameless apologists have retained a residue of institutional concern. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, has defended the legislative filibuster on the grounds that Democrats are using it today, but Republicans may need it tomorrow.

A charge of obstruction of Congress would compel senators like McConnell to weigh the same considerations with respect to Congressional oversight. Is protecting this president today—an individual whose four-year term is a fraction of the Constitution’s centuries—more important than preserving Congressional power for all time? Could, for example, the Benghazi investigation have occurred at all if President Obama had been able to withhold the testimony of Senate-confirmed officials or documentary evidence on the claim that the process was partisan?

That presidents and legislators—especially senators—are chosen on different electoral clocks helps force these considerations. A senator elected alongside President Trump in 2020 will serve two years beyond his term and consequently should consider constitutional issues on a time horizon that exceeds one administration.

Oversight of the administration’s antics in Ukraine can continue, of course. But the obstruction case is ready for trial. The evidence is indisputable, and indisputably clarifying.

What is on trial is not the transient fabulism of Donald Trump but rather the enduring architecture of the Constitution.

Remember which side of this you fell on when the next administration comes along and claims that their powers are unlimited and pushes it further.

Lots of blah blah with no substance.
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