Trump’s Letter To Pelosi

Ken AshfordL'Affaire Ukraine, Trump & Administration, Trump ImpeachmentLeave a Comment

Trump’s letter to Pelosi is like his tweets put to letterhead. He makes his regular false claims (the Electoral College result; cost of the Mueller probe; energy production; etc.), uses exclamation marks, and accuses Pelosi of lying about praying for him.

You can tell that the first draft was written by a normal person. Then Trump read it, but notes in the margins (with exclamation points!!), and dictated paragraphs, and that was put in the final letter. (UPDATE: In this case, White House counsel Pat Cipollone was not involved. Instead, Eric Ueland, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, helped draft the letter with input from top Trump policy adviser, Stephen Miller, and Michael Williams, an adviser to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. According to reports, Trump rejected a lot of input and suggestions on the letter…. and it shows)

The whole thing is nuts.

Yup. Anyone who writes “More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials” isn’t playing with a full deck.

Speaking of letters, there’s this nice letter signed by 750 historians:

We are American historians devoted to studying our nation’s past who have concluded that Donald J. Trump has violated his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” as George Mason described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, urgently and justly require his impeachment.

President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of Ukraine, under attack from Russia, an adversary power to the United States, by withholding essential military assistance in exchange for the fabrication and legitimization of false information in order to advance his own re-election.

President Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for representative government. So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the law.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with “the misconduct of public men” which involves “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”

It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.

Hamilton understood, as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an unscrupulous demagogue, “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanour.” That demagogue, Hamilton said, could easily enough manage “to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day.” Such a figure, Hamilton wrote, would “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

President Trump’s actions committed both before and during the House investigations fit Hamilton’s description and manifest utter and deliberate scorn for the rule of law and “repeated injuries” to constitutional democracy. That disregard continues and it constitutes a clear and present danger to the Constitution. We therefore strongly urge the House of Representatives to impeach the President.

Signed,*

Signatories are here

“It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”

Indeed.