Max Boot & why the GOP does not deserve to survive the impeachment debacle.

In response to:
Max A. Boot is an American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian.
He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.
He is now the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has also authored books of military history.
In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism:
Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party" in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

In response to:
The GOP doesn’t deserve to survive this debacle

By Max Boot Columnist
Feb. 1, 2020 at 12:58 p.m. EST

I was recently asked if I would ever rejoin the Republican Party after having registered as an independent the day after President Trump’s election in 2016. The answer is an emphatic no. Trump will leave office some day (I hope!), but he will leave behind a quasi-authoritarian party that is as corrupt as he is. The failure to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial revealed the GOP’s moral failure.

Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that, in his forthcoming book, former national security adviser John Bolton writes that Trump told him in August he wanted to freeze military aid to Ukraine “until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” For one brief moment it appeared that this blockbuster revelation would shatter the Republican wall of complicity. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) even said on Tuesday that he didn’t have the votes to stop witnesses from testifying. By Friday, he had the votes; the motion to call witnesses failed, 51-49, with only two Republicans (Mitt Romney and Susan Collins) voting “aye.”

The most significant of the “nay” votes was Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a 79-year-old political warhorse who is retiring this year. He admitted what the most purblind Trump partisans will not: that “it was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent.” The reason he did not need to hear any witnesses, Alexander explained, was because “there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven.” So far, so good. But then he pivoted to argue that for some reason Trump’s misconduct doesn’t meet the “high bar for an impeachable offense.” He concluded that the verdict on Trump should be left to “the presidential election” — you know, the election Trump just tried to fix.

Alexander’s statement raises more questions than it answers: If Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically does not rise to the level of impeachable conduct, what does? Does Alexander subscribe to Alan Dershowitz’s doctrine of presidential infallibility? And, even if he doesn’t want to keep Trump off the ballot, why doesn’t he advocate Trump’s censure or political defeat? But instead of advocating any punishment for Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct, Alexander wants him rewarded by being reelected.

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at least made clear that he rejects the argument — raised by the president’s lawyers but rejected by almost all scholars — "that ‘Abuse of Power’ can never constitute grounds for removal unless a crime or a crime-like action is alleged.” He, too, seems to assume that Trump is guilty, although he doesn’t quite say so. But Rubio argued “against removal in the context of the bitter divisions and deep polarization our country currently faces.”