Come On, Republicans! Stop Smearing Joe Biden.
There’s no honorable reason for Trump’s impeachment lawyers to keep repeating nonsense about the former vice president’s activities in Ukraine.
Photographer: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
Perhaps I’m just a hopeless optimist, but the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump grew a little bit less depressing on Thursday. As senators lobbed questions in the general direction of Trump’s defense team and the House impeachment managers serving as prosecutors, it felt as if Trump’s lawyers were backing gently away from the more radical implications of their arguments on Wednesday that would read impeachment out of the Constitution. To be sure, they didn’t explicitly say anything different. But during the first hours on Thursday they didn’t volunteer the arguments against “abuse of power” as a legitimate grounds for impeachment, sticking closer to issues of fact and procedure. And Alan Dershowitz, the Trump lawyer who had pushed the farthest, took to Twitter to complain he’d been misinterpreted.
If Team Trump is really de-emphasizing constitutional radicalism, it’s good news. Not just because accepting the Dershowitz version of the Constitution would give presidents far too much license for misbehavior. But also — again, if true — it would be at least a hint that someone in the Republican Party was able to engineer a course correction based on criticism and new information.