Lamar Alexander should draw on his own experience to break with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by demanding to hear key witnesses in the trial of President Trump’s impeachment.
Alexander, the senior Republican senator from Tennessee who is retiring at the end of this year, can leave a legacy of rising above partisanship to statesmanship by insisting on honoring the spirit of the Constitution’s provision for presidential impeachment. If the people’s House presents an impeachment to the Senate, it presumptively merits the seriousness of the real Senate “trial” described by the Constitution.
Why Alexander, in particular?
Two reasons. First, because Alexander has a reputation for integrity and institutional concerns. Second, and uniquely, because nobody in the Senate has as much first-hand reason as Alexander to understand and appreciate the deleterious effects of misused executive power, especially when not adequately checked by the president’s own party. Alexander’s own career was directly shaped by President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and then by a scandal involving a Democratic governor of Tennessee.
Alexander actually worked at one point in the Nixon White House, for the president’s executive assistant Bryce Harlow, who was one of the few top Nixon aides never tainted by scandal. Alexander also worked two stints, one well before and one well after Watergate, as a legislative aide to Tennessee’s Sen. Howard Baker, famous for being one of the first top Republicans to abandon partisanship by calling Nixon to account.
Alexander’s own first race for governor in 1974, however, was bedeviled by the national anti-Republican backlash to Watergate. Even though he himself had a perfectly clean record, his opponent Ray Blanton slammed him unmercifully for his brief ties to Nixon, and he lost the race in the state that had been trending Republican. Four years later, Blanton himself was enmeshed in various scandals that eventually landed him in federal prison, and Alexander rode into office as a white-knight reformer.
Alexander should thus understand, to the marrow, how a party’s refusal to police its own leaders can come back to bite the party, not to mention the citizens its officials are supposed to serve.
That is why Alexander should call a press conference to explain, in carefully-constructed speech format, why it is so deeply dishonest to hold a “trial” without witnesses — especially without the key, first-hand witnesses who previously had been prevented, by court cases or presidential directives, from testifying.
The senator should also explain why the witnesses are needed. We know Trump traduced at least the intent, and probably the letter, of the Impoundment Control Act by withholding lawfully mandated military aid from Ukraine. We know he turned the usual international “mutual legal assistance” standards, not to mention ordinary notions of sovereignty, on their heads by trying to sic a foreign government on American citizens accused of breaking no U.S. laws. And we know he led numerous administration officials to conclude he tied those two inappropriate endeavors together with a quid pro quo that at least bordered on an illegal request for a “thing of value” from a foreign government for use in a U.S. political campaign.
What we need to know are the exact circumstances, the level of specificity of the president’s directives, the justifications offered for the directives and the context in which they were offered, and any further illumination possible on Trump’s intent or motives. Clearly, the public needs to know these things, so as to ascertain whether, in Nixon’s phraseology, their “president is a crook.” Contrarily, if there was context that puts Trump’s actions in a better light, we definitely need to know that, too.
Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton obviously were in positions that would allow them to shed light on these questions. Alexander knows that to refuse to hear their evidence would be to make a mockery of the constitutional system’s intended checks on presidential misconduct.
Alexander enjoys a reputation for probity and for rising above political gamesmanship. He is retiring this year, meaning he will not again face the wrath of voters. He is free to stand on principle and has a choice as to what final legacy he will leave. A call to conscience from him, in a high-profile but soberly worded speech, would carry great weight. It’s time for him to step up, to do the right thing by demanding a real trial with witnesses, and to urge his colleagues to do the same.
