It’s easy to call an impeachment “historic,” but what kind of history did we really see this week? Most of us couldn’t answer that in real time, but POLITICO Magazine tracked down the tiny handful of Americans who can: The historians and legal analysts who specialize in the rare, high-stakes process
This week we invited a group of them to watch the Congressional hearings with an eye to what actually made history. They saw quite a bit of it unfold in the hearings on President Donald Trump’s conduct around Ukraine, and the conduct of the Congress looking into it.
The most unprecedented thing about these hearings was brought home to me by a journalist who, during a break in the Friday testimony of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, asked me, “How do you expect Congressman Nunes to go after her when the hearing resumes?” For example, in both the Nixon and Clinton cases, the parties were united in their resolution that the president must provide relevant evidence when requested by Congress in the impeachment inquiry. It is inconceivable that, in either case, the president’s party would have refused to join requests for White House witnesses or documents and then argue that the case against the president could not be proven because of the absence of the very witnesses or documents the President withheld.
Even those of us with two impeachments under our belts have never seen anything quite like this one. Besides the modern procedural innovation that this time the House Judiciary Committee is not in charge of all aspects of the inquiry, this is also the first impeachment investigation that a citizen can watch unfold in real time. In the Clinton era, the public practically learned the whole case for the prosecution at once, when the House dumped Independent Counsel Kenneth W.
Never before has a presidential impeachment inquiry focused so heavily on U.S. foreign policy. That matters because the hearings this week, which involved more big-picture questions about national security than domestic affairs, transcended politics—or at least should have—more than any of the earlier hearings.
Two days later, we heard from former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. She is an anti-corruption crusader, who has served under presidents of both parties, and was fired by Trump after a smear campaign orchestrated by Giuliani and corrupt Ukrainians. What struck me most about Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony was his poignant description of the violence being visited upon Ukrainian soldiers at the hands of Russian forces in the Donbass region of Ukraine. U.S. security assistance “allows the Ukrainian military to deter further incursions by the Russians against their own, against Ukrainian territory,” Taylor explained. “If that further incursion, further aggression were to take place, more Ukrainians would die.
In his testimony, Taylor said that suspending military aid to Ukraine was wrong. Ukraine, after all, is a country struggling against years of Soviet domination, and it’s a fledgling democracy eager to align itself with the West and its stated values of freedom and self-determination.
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