Cartoon by Milt Priggee

Trump impeachment hearings today will echo through the ages

CNN: The gravity and drama of the first televised impeachment hearings into Donald Trump's presidency on Wednesday will imprint themselves on history and reverberate far from Washington.

The most crucial stage of the Ukraine investigation so far has profound implications beyond the political and personal reputation of Trump and the question of whether he abused his power by seeking political favors from a foreign power.

His fate will have sweeping consequences for the future understanding of powers vested within the presidency itself. The hearings will test whether the ancient machinery of US governance can effectively investigate a President who ignores the charges against him and fogs fact in defining a new post-truth political era. And notwithstanding Trump's current Republican firewall, the hearings will begin to decide whether a presidency that has rocked America and the world will reach its full natural term.

The fact that there is an impeachment process at all -- and a debate over whether the President is so corrupt he should be ousted between elections -- is in itself something of a national tragedy. There's a reason why Gerald Ford called the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 before he was formally impeached, a "long national nightmare."

The next few months will scar America for years to come. As the Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson impeachments did before it, this process will reflect and intensify the ideological civil war that is tearing at national unity and threatening the nation's forward momentum.

Democratic leaders, who long resisted demands from their party's liberal activists to impeach Trump, are taking a considerable risk by embarking on this momentous constitutional road. Given the explosive revelations about Trump's conduct in Ukraine however, they may have had little political choice.

In all likelihood, Republican senators will not vote to convict and oust Trump, opening the possibility of a political backlash. It's just not clear yet whether Democrats or the GOP would come off worse. Trump is likely to view an eventual escape from censure as a validation of his unrestrained behavior and a license to continue to test constitutional customs.

"I've always thought that the strongest argument for impeachment was also the strongest argument against it, which is, if you don't impeach a president who commits conduct of this kind, what does that say to the next president about what they can do and to the next Congress?" House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said in an interview with National Public Radio on Tuesday.

"At the same time, if you do impeach, but the President is acquitted, what does that say to the next president? The next Congress? There's no good or simple answer," he said.

Yet for all the bitterness and uncertainty that it stirs, the impeachment process is also a reaffirmation and test of the democratic codes of self-government first set down in Philadelphia nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.

It will provide the most significant judgment yet on a riotous presidency that has already skipped past one existential scandal in the Russia election meddling scheme.

The Democratic charge that could see Trump shamed as only the third impeached President in history could hardly be more grave. He is effectively accused of committing a crime against the nation itself and the political system that guards its freedoms.

Specifically, Democrats charge Trump with conspiring with a foreign power to influence a US election, an offense many observers believe satisfies the impeachable standard of "Treason, Bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

The eventual case may encompass campaign finance offenses, the flouting of his presidential oath to uphold the law and the Constitution and allege obstruction over his withholding of witnesses and evidence. In more symbolic terms, it would validate the fears of America's founders of one of the greatest threats to their democratic experiment.

"History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government," wrote the first President, George Washington, in his farewell address >>>