Commentary: Senate Republicans Bear Witness To Their Own Mess

TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Thanks to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, it’s now the Republicans in the U.S. Senate who are on trial.

The reports of the revelations in Bolton’s forthcoming book that President Donald Trump in fact did attempt to extort campaign help from Ukraine by withholding military aid has changed things.

The GOP’s strategy of searching for the truth about the president’s actions by imitating ostriches and burying their heads in the sand no longer is tenable. No matter how far the Republicans try to run from the truth or how hard they try to hide, the truth is going to find them.

Truth is like that. Just like the sun, it may be hidden from view for a while, but it never goes away. It’s always there.

And, eventually, it comes out from behind the clouds and shines its light once more.

In this case, the truth puts Senate Republicans in a bad, bad spot.

They have two choices.

They can continue to follow the course demanded by President Trump and urged by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and continue to stonewall. They can refuse to call any witnesses and vote to acquit the president on the two counts of impeachment in a state of pretended blissful ignorance.

Following that course means defying the 75 percent of Americans, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, who want the president’s Senate trial to include witnesses. That’s not just Democrats. Roughly half – 49 percent – of Republicans polled want to hear witnesses. So do 75 percent of independents.

If the Republicans in the Senate hold firm and exclude witnesses – including Bolton – from the proceedings, they’ll be giving Democrats a huge gift. From now until the November election, incumbent GOP senators on the ballot will hear their opponents use the term “cover-up” as if it were punctuation, sprinkling the charge through their stump speeches as often as they use commas and periods.

But, if Republicans opt to include witnesses, they’ll hand Democrats another big present. The GOP will give their opponents wall-to-wall media coverage of the president’s transgressions – the lies Donald Trump has told and the laws he has broken.

Not only will the public get confirmation of what everyone already knows – that this president treats the Constitution of the United States with the same respect he gives Kleenex – but they’ll also see how much he concealed from the members of his own party, the Republicans who have fought with ferocity to protect him.

They’ll look either like dupes or like henchmen. Neither portrait will be flattering.

Frying pan or fire.

That’s where the president has placed them.

Trump doesn’t see it that way, of course.

He’s doing his best to blame Bolton for this debacle. He and his mouthpieces have tried to argue that the staunchly conservative and fiercely partisan Bolton somehow has become a stooge of the Democrats.

Because that charge isn’t sticking, Trump also has worked to discredit Bolton by accusing his former national security advisor of being a war monger. The president says this as if Bolton’s aggressive and confrontational attitudes somehow should be a new revelation, some sort of grand surprise.

If Bolton was trying to hide his jingoistic tendencies, he chose an odd way to go about it. Giving high-profile speeches and interviews over two decades, as Bolton did, calling for military responses to just about every foreign-policy challenge isn’t an effective way to conceal one’s hunger for conflict.

If Donald Trump just recently discovered that John Bolton likes a fight the way pigs like slop, the president clearly hadn’t been paying attention to, oh, anything for the past 20 years. And the Trump administration must use the equivalent of Ouija boards to vet candidates for high-visibility, high-responsibility jobs rather than traditional background checks.

It’s not John Bolton’s fault that Republicans in the Senate are in such a fix.

It’s Donald Trump’s fault.

And their own.

If just a few Republicans in the Senate had summoned up the nerve to remind this president that he needs them just as much as they might need him, they might have been able to put a leash on him and force him to honor his constitutional obligations.

But they didn’t.

So, they are where they are.

On trial themselves.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.