(Dec. 6) 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?…

[The full column is at this link.]

 

Tags: , , , ,