In a sense, that may be how it works out. But I look at this without the expectation of a conviction by the Chamber of Invertabrates, and still think it has to be done.
It is pretty darn clear that the President is using the tools and powers of his public office to obtain compromising information on a domestic political opponent. He used a private lawyer to spearhead the matter. He used dollars appropriated by the Congress and earmarked for an ally in need as the carrot, and withholding or slow-walking it as the stick. And he wanted to accomplish a private domestic political purpose relating to his reelection campaign, and there is at least some meaningful evidence (testimony from legitimate, knowledgeable and largely apolitical people) that this effort was at the expense of, or placed at risk, the public policy issues associated with Ukraine and NATO and Western national security interests. He used fiduciary powers for private gain.
I can’t regard this as “futile” – that is, because the Senate won’t convict, the House should just roll up the carpet and get back to work on other matters. And I genuinely think anyone who does think that this is futile really doesn’t understand the stakes and the history. The stakes I think – and I apologize for sounding dramatic and overly momentous – are something on the order of the country’s basic respect for the rule of law. If a President – and I mean any President – is permitted to use the immediate functions and powers entrusted to him or her by the electorate to leverage personal political goals and gains, we are reducing ourselves to the rule of strongmen, badly disguised by a thin wrapping paper of faux legal and political legitimacy. We are reduced to a country in which the enormous powers of governance will be used not necessarily to govern, but to win on a personal level. And that is just disturbing to this citizen.
The history is part of this. Someone has to be the counterpoint to this example of using the tools of governance for personal gain and profit – and the House is, practically and constitutionally, the sole entity to carry it out. Even if the Senate acquits the President, our history will at least reflect an ardent, serious, procedurally-sound and fair effort and process by which the President’s actions were exposed, understood, brought into the light of day and into common parlance, and judged pursuant to the governing foundational document that is the contract between and among all of us. And that’s important to me, and I think will be important to my children’s generation. Someone f*cking tried.
On the question of whether the House Managers can retain special counsel, all I remember is that Graham was a Manager in the Clinton Impeachment Trial, and used it to creep his way up the greasy rope. It's how I learned that he had been a JAG lawyer, I think. I would very much like to see Daniel Goldman actually put on a trial and oral argument in the Senate.
