"Dear Republican Senators..." New York Times Columnist David Leonhardt

   

Republican David Frum was George W. Bush's chief speech writer. He coined the phrase "axis of evil."

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    "Dear Republican Senators..." 

By David Leonhardt Opinion Columnist

I’ve spent some time in recent days reading the words that Republican senators have written and spoken about what America means to them.

“America is different,” Marco Rubio has said. Ben Sasse has written: “Jefferson called America a ‘light unto the nations.’ Lincoln said that we are ‘the last, best hope of earth.’” Josh Hawley, shortly after joining the Senate, told his colleagues, “We must put aside the tired orthodoxies of years past, and forge a new politics of national renewal.”

My column today is a plea to those Republican senators: Please, listen to your own words about the distinctive greatness of this country. America is better than President Trump and his grubby attempts to put his own interests before the national interest. You — and only you, the Republican members of the Senate — have the ability to end this nightmare. Now is the time to begin distancing yourself from Trump, for the country’s sake and, in the end, your own.

Swing and a Schiff

The Economist magazine had a more negative take on Adam Schiff’s performance Thursday in effectively the first big hearing of the impeachment process. Schiff, as I explained in my Friday newsletter, is the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and has generally been among the Democratic Party’s most effective questioners of the Trump administration.

The Economist argued that Schiff made a mistake by focusing on “process rather than the substance of the whistle-blower’s complaint.” Schiff took a confrontational approach to questioning Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, because Maguire was slow to forward the whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress.

But the complaint ultimately made it to Congress. “The Democrats’ obsession with process made them seem petty and small,” The Economist wrote. The smarter approach would have been to allow Maguire — a Trump administration official — to emphasize his belief that the whistle-blower acted appropriately. The hearing eventually got around to this point, but it took too long.

I still think the hearing on the whole made the impeachment inquiry seem serious and credible. But I also thought The Economist made a fair point. “If the Democrats want to move the needle further, they will have to do better than they did on Thursday,” The Economist concluded.

Related: “Everything, the entire outcome, will depend on public opinion,” Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal. “If everything depends on public opinion then a lot depends on how the House comports itself. Will the Democrats be sober, steady, fair-minded? Or will they be disorganized divas who play to their base and win over no one else? Are they capable of rising to the moment?”