February, 2020
Lincoln – It's good to see former congressman John Cavanaugh weigh in against Senator Ben Sasse's tortured rationale for his votes in the impeachment trial of President Trump. Sasse acknowledged the president was wrong but voted not to allow documents and witnesses in the trial.
John Cavanaugh, a great former state senator as well as congressman, is right on all counts in his Omaha World-Herald rejoinder. Sasse's explanations for his votes are downright embarrassing.
Sasse's arguments actually support a vote for, not against, additional documents and witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial, to determine the role of the president's advisers. They also support a vote to convict, even if not to remove (for which a supermajority is required), so as to draw a line on presidential behavior, which Sasse concedes was wrong. Sasse and up to fourteen Republicans had an opportunity to chasten, rather than to embolden, a president they know is a frightening danger to the Constitution and the rule of law.
If Sasse did not want to be the decisive vote to convict and remove, he could have so stated and thereby freed himself to follow the logic of his arguments. There is nothing wrong, and sometimes everything right, in counting votes and casting one's own accordingly.
Sasse failed a historic test. So did several of his Republican colleagues, who gave their colleague Mitt Romney no cover for his courageous vote. Romney is now in physical danger for saying what he concluded was simply and obviously the truth, as he saw it unfold in the trial. Lamar Alexander also failed the test and made his vote all the worse by suggesting that, although the House managers proved their case in his mind, removing the president by the prescribed Constitutional process would throw gasoline on the fire of national divisiveness. All tin-pot dictators in the world would love to have such supine lawmakers in their legislative branches. The fire that comes to mind when Lamar Alexander suggests one is the Reichstag Fire, and the rationale for his vote like that of Paul von Hindenburg, and we know how that turned out.
And then there is Nebraska Senator Fischer, who in 2016 asked Donald Trump to step down from his presidential candidacy, in the name of decency, in favor of Mike Pence. The impeachment vote was her chance, again in the name of decency, to take the same position. Obviously decency is not what it used to be, to Senator Fischer. She did not, even when given the opportunity of a symbolic vote to chasten Trump, so much as equivocate. For shame.
