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The United States is not an authoritarian country. President Trump has failed to carry out many of his authoritarian impulses — like, say, banning Muslims from entering the United States or jailing his political opponents.
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And yet, the events that have taken place in the Senate this week would nonetheless have been unimaginable for most of our modern history. They are the makings of authoritarianism — in which the party in power decides it can reject democratic principles for the simple reason that it holds power.
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A majority of senators, all Republican, are not interested in hearing evidence of presidential wrongdoing. Many are on the verge of accepting Trump’s argument, made by his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, that any action a president takes to help his chances of re-election is, by definition, in the national interest. The nation, according to this argument, is indistinguishable from the president.
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This defense, the political scientist Brian Klaas writes, is “the kind of thing I have heard in authoritarian countries — that if the leader does it, and they think it’s good for the public, then it’s legitimate.”
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Susan Hennessey of Lawfare: “I don’t think people fully grasp the constitutional danger of this moment. If the Senate were to refuse to call relevant witnesses with direct testimony of grave presidential wrongdoing then we can no longer understand impeachment to be a genuine check on executive overreach. … Impeachment is merely a measure of how many members of the president’s party sit in the Senate.”
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My colleague Jamelle Bouie: “The president could do far more than solicit dirt from foreign governments. He could have his political opponents arrested or he could promise pardons to supporters who physically intimidated Democratic voters. ‘To protect my reelection and thus the national interest, I am ordering the National Guard to occupy and shutdown Democratic precincts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as Arizona and North Carolina.’”
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Dershowitz implausibly tried to claim yesterday that he hadn’t said what everyone heard him say. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru offered a charitable reading of the attempted walk-back before concluding, “Alan Dershowitz is wrong.”
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The one silver lining of this week’s events, argues Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, is that Senate Republicans’ brazenness makes it easier for House Democrats to justify continuing to investigate Trump: “They can keep digging into Trump from next week through fall, keeping public attention not only on his corruption and abuse of power but also on the Republican conviction that abuse of power is permissible.”
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If the Senate does block the calling of witnesses, writes Elizabeth de la Vega, a former prosecutor, House Democrats “should subpoena Trump, [John] Bolton, [Mick] Mulvaney, [Rudy] Giuliani and others immediately.”
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