Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, may not be a good fit for his conservative Alabama constituents, but he makes good sense when considering President Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial.
Actually, what Jones wrote on Dec. 30 in the Washington Post isn’t just good sense; it’s common sense and basic civics. The real pity is that good, common-sense civics is such a rarity on Capitol Hill and in much of the media these days.
In his guest column, Jones made what once would have been the incontrovertible point that the purpose of a trial, even a quasi-political trial that could lead to the president’s removal, is the discovery of the whole truth, to which senators are expected to respond accordingly.
“For Americans to have confidence in the impeachment process,” Jones wrote, “the Senate must conduct a full, fair and complete trial with all relevant evidence regarding the president’s conduct.” He continued, “We cannot allow the full truth to evade this trial only to be revealed in some future memoir or committee hearing.”
It is astonishing that any supposedly serious person would say otherwise. To ignore the duly expressed determination of a majority of the “people’s House” (and a consistent plurality of the public), that the president has committed acts meriting a Senate trial, is to eviscerate this nation’s constitutional design.
By now, it is well known that Democrats want to call at least four witnesses they were unable to call in the House because Trump himself had blocked them. Jones clearly and concisely detailed the major questions that two of them, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, should answer. Those questions are not just peripheral but essential to determining the truth about what Trump did and under what circumstances he did it.
To Bolton, Jones would ask, “What so alarmed you that you ordered your deputy, Fiona Hill, to report it to the National Security Council’s top lawyer?”
Bolton is a decades-long veteran of high-level public service and a crackerjack lawyer as well. He also is known as a strong proponent of presidential authority. If even he thought something Trump had done or ordered crossed an important legal line, the Senate and the public should know exactly what it was.
The fact that Bolton resigned or was fired the very day the now-famous whistleblower’s report became public suggests that Trump’s Ukrainian actions were central to Bolton’s exit. As Jones noted, Bolton is uniquely situated to discuss whether Trump ever would have released the military aid to Ukraine if that report had not been filed.
Jones’s closing plea was a simple and eloquent statement of what should be seen as an ethical imperative. It dovetails with Alexander Hamilton’s explanation in “Federalist No. 65” that impeachment is meant to be “a national inquest into the conduct of public men.” Hamilton said that senators, acting “in their judicial character as a court,” must “preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers.”
Hence, Jones was right to write on Monday that “every trial is a pursuit of the truth. That’s all I want. It’s all each of us should want. Now that it’s the Senate’s time to fulfill its duty, my final question is: Will a majority of senators pursue the truth above all else?”
If any senator’s goal is to obscure the truth rather than to air it fully, that senator should recuse himself or herself from the trial or else leave office entirely.
