Quid pro quo, or not?

William Taylor's opening statement in his deposition as part of the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry included a description of a 7 September 2019 phone call between Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as relayed to Taylor by NSC Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs Tim Morrison.

According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo.” But President Trump did insist that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself.

Donald Trump may have insisted he was not asking for a quid pro quo, but does his assertion fit the facts? Here's Taylor's description of Sondland's conversation with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy subsequent to Sondland's 7 September call with Trump.

The following day, on September 8, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelenskyy, himself, had to “clear things up and do it in public.” President Trump said it was not a “quid pro quo.” Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not “clear things up” in public, we would be at a “stalemate.” I understood a “stalemate” to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.

"Stalemate" only makes sense if there's some kind of interaction. In business and diplomacy, negotiations stalemate when neither side is willing to change its bargaining position.

Trump knew Ukraine needed the military assistance Congress had approved but that he was refusing to disburse. If Trump had a different reason for holding up that aid, a reason that would stand public scrutiny, he would have told Zelenskyy.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Trump was holding up the assistance in order to extort a public announcement that President Zelenskyy would "investigate" Joe Biden in order to dig up "dirt" that Trump's campaign could use in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump also wants whatever flimsy vindication can be conjured up for the nonsensical conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)

"Give me dirt on Biden and I'll give you your military aid." That's the message Trump was sending Zelenskyy.

In the truth-telling world, we call that a quid pro quo — literally, this for that.

Whether Trump was lying or being an imbecile, his insistence that he wasn't asking for a quid pro quo is simply false.

Trump's defenders will repeat until the end of time that he never asked for a quid pro quo. Sondland himself tried to parrot that line, not just in the 8 September phone call with Taylor but in subsequent text messages to Taylor. Taylor, not being a fool, saw through that bullshit.

So do the rest of us.

Yes, it was a quid pro quo. And no amount of bullshit from Trump or his defenders can change that.

Is it an impeachable offense? Different question but as long as I'm writing — yes, it goddamned well is impeachable, too.

Trump leveraged the power of the presidency to extort a foreign head of state for personal gain. He wasn't acting in the interests of the United States. That's a violation of his oath of office, which requires him to act in the nation's interests, not his own.

You may love Trump, you may think he has gotten a raw deal from those of us who didn't vote for him, but you goddamned well ought to see what a terrible precedent his extortion sets for future presidents — including those you might loathe.

He has grossly abused the power of his office in exactly the way some of the Founders worried a president might. He must be impeached. I would also urge Senate Republicans to give serious consideration not just to convicting him but to removing him from office. There are a ton of reasons he is unfit to be president (and Congressional Republicans will privately concede most of them) but this incident alone is sufficient to justify that extreme step,

Of "executive power"

The United States Constitution, in Article II, Section, 1, states:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Curiously, nowhere in the Constitution is "The executive Power" defined.

Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson took a stab at figuring out what "executive power" actually meant to the generation that wrote the Constitution. His piece begins, somewhat provocatively, "Is the president a king?" Put so baldly the question sounds "absurd", as Mortenson admits, but "[a] great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point". One of those judges is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and one of those lawyers is Attorney General William Barr. In short, imperial-presidency advocates carry a lot of weight in our current government.

As for Mortenson (spoiler alert!):

After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Revolutionary War: Britain's George III is no hero in any American telling of that tale. The astonishing thing, then, is that so many otherwise intelligent people think the Constitution would grant the president such royal power.

(Lest you think this is an anti-Trump hit piece, by the way, Prof. Mortenson notes that both Obama and W also argued for arguably over-broad interpretations of presidential power when it suited them.)

This is an important piece to read if you want to understand what the founding generation actually intended the president to do in our government. It wasn't much, at least at the beginning of the republic.

Prof. Mortenson has a warning for textual originalists, as so many conservatives today are:

You can advocate originalism in constitutional interpretation. You can support the imperial presidency. But you can’t do both at the same time.

However you feel about presidential power, you owe it to yourself to read this relatively short but cogent piece.

The rot in our democracy

In a piece in The Atlantic, Prof. Marty Lederman and Ben Wittes (editor in chief of the respected blog Lawfare) carefully review the impeachment inquiry being conducted by the House of Representatives into Donald Trump's 25 July 2019 phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Of greater importance, though, are their insights into the context of the call — specifically, what the call says about Trump and his world view, and what the reaction to the call says about us.

Trump defenders want us to believe that impeachment is only appropriate for a violation of the law. Lederman and Wittes know better.

The president’s derelictions are far more profound and more fundamental to the constitutional order than a mere violation of the criminal code. To use the scholar Charles Black’s canonical test for whether impeachment is warranted, Trump engaged in (1) extremely serious conduct that (2) corrupts or subverts the political and governmental process and “tend[s] seriously to undermine and corrupt the political order,” and (3) is “plainly wrong in [itself] to a person of honor, or to a good citizen, regardless of words on the statute books.”

Lederman and Wittes note that while both Nixon and Bill Clinton had their defenders, those defenders argued that the wrongdoing didn't constitute an impeachable offense. No one argued that no wrongdoing had occurred.

Yet that’s effectively where we find ourselves now—confronted with a president, and some of his defenders, who would insist that abuses of presidential authority are unexceptional or, worse still, consistent with the president’s constitutional oath and duty.

In the long run, this defense of Trump’s Ukraine machinations may well prove more corrosive than what occurred in the July 25 conversation itself. ... [W]e’re perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.

The fact is, Trump followers' identification with Trump has gotten so problematic that they can no longer see an attempt to hold him accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors as not merely sanctioned, but required, by the rule of law. To those followers, any attempt to hold Trump accountable is nothing less than an attack on them, singly and collectively. Because Trump loyalists make up the largest constituency in the Republican Party, that party's lawmakers have refused to condemn what they know — or at least knew, before Trump came along — is Trump's copious track record of degrading the office of President.

The time of reckoning is at hand. Congressional Republicans now must ask themselves if their desire to stay in office is worth killing their consciences and bidding farewell to their morals. Their souls are at stake.

If Congressional Republicans continue to honor the demands of those of their supporters whose moral compasses have been deranged by Trump, all in hope of remaining in office, those lawmakers will have betrayed their oath and their country. They know what they're witnessing in Trump is abhorrent to the nation. They know he debases his office with his shameless greed and corruption. They know he is more sympathetic and attentive to the needs of Vladimir Putin than to ordinary Americans.

The damage Trump has done goes way beyond his own misdeeds. He has debased the country's sense of right and wrong. Impeaching him for a phone call seems like a ridiculously small amount of punishment for such grave harm — but it might be all we can do. Let's at least not blow it.

Our integrity and honor are at stake.