Where are today’s statesmen? Are there any? Evidence for their existence is slim.
When a question as serious as impeachment looms, senators and representatives owe it to the public to put partisan hackery aside, to apply independent thought to the evidence, to avoid ideological cliches, and to try to analyze the whole situation as if the party labels involved were reversed. As Hamilton wrote in “Federalist 65,” they must “preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality.”
If almost every member of one political party not only stands firmly on one side of the question before the case is even presented, but also uses all the same senseless buzzwords about it, while every member of the other party does the same on the other side, that’s a pretty good sign that groupthink rather than “unawed and uninfluenced … impartiality” is being maintained. For the public to hear few or no gradations of gray, while their elected officials admit not even the slightest respect for the opposing position, is for the public trust to be abused and abandoned.
In the current instance, how is it possible that not a single House or Senate Democrat, out of 280, can acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine look sleazy even if not illegal or that some top Ukrainian officials publicly disfavored Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign even if undertaking no systematic, comprehensive effort to defeat him?
Far, far worse, how can only a single handful of the 250 congressional Republicans not admit that Russia systematically and comprehensively worked to aid Trump in 2016, that Trump’s interest in Ukrainian “corruption” begins and ends only with information damaging to his own Democratic rivals, and that for a president to sic a foreign government on a U.S. citizen without citing a single specific U.S. law the citizen supposedly violated is unprecedented and on its face improper?
How can almost every Republican in the House pretend that Trump didn’t act improperly by withholding military assistance mandated by law, much less by using it as implicit leverage for a ginned up foreign inquiry of his rival? How can Republicans not admit that if Trump repeatedly, in private and in public, has urged Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and if he repeatedly urged multiple people to take direction on Ukrainian policy from Rudy Giuliani and if Giuliani, in private and in public, has tied the military assistance to the Biden investigation and if the acting White House chief of staff has said of course there was a form of quid pro quo and if virtually the entire diplomatic corps, including numerous diplomats with Republican pedigrees, thought Trump’s actions were either highly improper or illegal, then surely there is ample grounds for concern and for a formal inquiry?
How can they literally say, repeatedly, that Trump was entirely justified?
It would be one thing, at least debatable, to say that Trump acted inappropriately but that more evidence must be analyzed, with an open mind, to decide if a high bar for impeachment and removal has been overtopped. But to pretend there was nothing wrong here, and that everyone should just move along, is fundamentally dishonest. It is even more dishonest to call it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” or to spread ludicrous, Kremlin-sponsored conspiracy theories blaming Ukraine rather than Russia for systematic election interference in 2016.
Democrats cry crocodile tears about the solemnity of impeachment after spending two years crying wolf about earlier, unproven allegations against Trump supposedly being impeachable. Republicans know darn well they would be yelling for impeachment if a Democratic president did what Trump did, but they now won’t admit an iota of doubt about Trump’s propriety.
Statesmen would at least avoid rushing to judgment or, worse, to mindless demagoguery. Statesmen would all sound slightly different from each other, all adding individual insight rather than sounding like a bad Greek chorus.
Alas, statesmen are in short or nonexistent supply. Meretricious mandarins, however, are alarmingly abundant.
