There’s been some disagreement among Democrats as to whether articles of impeachment should be narrowly focused on Ukraine or expanded to include the Mueller report and other crimes. The argument for a narrow focus is that it keeps things simple. The crime Trump committed with Ukraine easy to understand and so egregious that it’s impeachable on its own .
At first, this seemed like a reasonable argument. As time goes on, and the GOP flails for a defense, the narrow focus seems to be missing something important.
The GOP is throwing a lot of sh*t at the wall and hoping something sticks as a reason to oppose impeachment. They don’t have much of a case on the facts, but they’re still going on about the process. Their biggest weapon, however, is the argument that, “Sure, he shouldn’t have done it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.” It’s a poor argument, but it at least sounds debatable.
Now, let’s include the whole Trump/Russia affair as described in the Mueller Report. There are 448 pages of bad behavior on Trump’s part, but he wasn’t impeached over it because it was too long and complicated for most people, including Republican legislators, to bother reading.
But when we put the two together, we start to see a pattern of behavior. A pattern where, time and time again, Trump puts his personal interests ahead of the interests of the United States of America.
When we start to consider Trump’s corrupt pattern of behavior, we also see his violations of the emoluments clause, both foreign and domestic. We see his campaign finance violations. His nepotism. These should all be included in the case against him. Feel free to add to the list.
Republicans complain that Democrats have been trying to impeach Trump from Day One of his presidency. The fact is that Trump has been hopelessly corrupt since long before Day One. He’s displayed a corrupt pattern of behavior for his entire career, during his candidacy, and during his entire time in office.
The Ukraine extortion attempt was bad enough all by itself. But Trump’s crimes goes way beyond that. He’s shown a corrupt pattern of behavior all along, and that’s why he needs to be impeached.