Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden
Merkley and Wyden are Oregon’s U.S. Senators
No one runs for the U.S. Senate with the hope of becoming an impeachment juror. We both have dedicated our time in Congress to working to deliver for Oregonians—and we would both much rather have spent all of our time the past two weeks doing just that than sitting as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump. But we took an oath to protect, defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. And any time an American is called to serve on a jury, it is a solemn responsibility to consider evidence and render our best judgment of justice to our peers. Our system of fair and impartial trials is a bedrock principle that has set America apart as a beacon of hope, equality and fairness in the world, as is engraved in stone above our Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law.”
While many Oregonians and Americans held out hope that our Republican colleagues would join us in the effort to produce a free and fair trial, in the end, those efforts were in vain. Instead, the trial played out as many feared it would. The House impeachment managers outlined the president’s wrongdoings and conclusive evidence of his extortion of a foreign government and subsequent cover-up, but it was irrelevant. Openly plotting with the White House, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked all witnesses and documents—the first time that has ever happened in an impeachment trial in all of American history. Oregonians, whether in counties that Trump won or that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, told us that any legitimate trial honoring the spirit of fairness embodied by the “Oregon Way” must have witnesses. But the goal of this sham trial was to deliver an acquittal. It was not about getting to the truth, exercising our constitutional responsibility to act as a check and balance or protecting American taxpayers and citizens from being taken advantage of by a corrupt executive whose core response was “I am above the law.” The president’s defense was fiction because he was not fighting corruption in Ukraine, he was causing it.
Nevertheless, since the House of Representatives passed and sent the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, we have considered the evidence laid out by the House managers and the president’s defense team.
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With all of the information made available to us, the choice ultimately was clear. Even with the White House and Senate Republicans blocking access to witnesses and documents, there was overwhelming evidence that the president did not just withhold military funding from Ukraine as a means of coercing the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation solely for the purpose of harming a political rival; the president led a corrupt, international criminal conspiracy that spanned a year, and then attempted to cover it up by obstructing Congress from its constitutionally mandated oversight duties.
Nothing presented by the president’s defense team contradicted the evidence brought by the House managers. In fact, even some of our Republican Senate colleagues who voted for acquittal admitted that the president abused his office.
Any choice other than to vote to hold the president accountable for his actions would not only be a dereliction of our duties, but also an invitation to future corruption and to undermine our constitutional system of checks and balances.
The founders of our government put impeachment in the Constitution to address precisely these concerns. In a letter to George Washington, Alexander Hamilton expressed the dangers of a system with no check on the executive:
“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the ability of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
The impeachment of a president is a rare occurrence in our nation—we’ve only seen two other such trials in the Senate—and that’s a good thing. We deliberated carefully; listened to both sides; listened to the Oregonians who came to our open-to-all town halls, called and wrote into our offices; and searched deep within our hearts to come to a verdict. That verdict was unmistakable: Guilty on both counts.
While a majority of our colleagues came to a different conclusion, there should be no mistake: This sham trial did not exonerate the president. Indeed, it demonstrated quite the contrary.
It is our greatest hope that no future president will use the example set by Donald Trump as a rationale for replicating his misbehavior, nor any future Senate will use this sham trial as a model for how to weigh the misconduct of a president. If this trial is to serve any future service, it should be as an example of the dangers of putting party before country, and how, though sometimes it can be frail and manipulated, our system of checks and balances is critical to democracy and worthy of protection.
"Opinion" - Google News
February 09, 2020 at 09:00PM
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Opinion: Why we voted to remove the president - oregonlive.com
"Opinion" - Google News
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