Last week, Tennessee’s Republican Senator Lamar Alexander helped turn the tide against Democrats’ attempt to secure witness testimony for President Donald Trump’s Senate trial with his last-minute decision to oppose the proposal. This weekend on Meet the Press, he desperately tried to defend his decision to essentially fast track an acquittal for the president, no matter the evidence against him, and he went to some outrageous extremes in the process. He claimed that perhaps Trump did not know about the process to call his own administration’s attorney general to ask him to look into the (unfounded) claims of corruption that he tried to bribe Ukraine into investigation.
So now they’ve arrived at the idiocy defense. When host Chuck Todd pointed out that the Constitution itself was written largely with a fear of foreign interference in mind — check out the emoluments clause — Alexander flippantly replied:
‘If you hooked up with Ukraine to wage war on the United States… you could be expelled. But this wasn’t that. This was the kind of — what the president should have done, if he was upset about Joe Biden and his son and what they were doing in Ukraine, he should have called the attorney general and told him that and let the attorney general handle it the way they always handle cases involving public figures.’
Trump, of course, did not call the attorney general — although he did say that Ukraine should get in touch with him. Instead, through a months-long pressure campaign that included an infamous phone conversation that he had with Ukraine’s current president, he got in touch with that country instead. This scheme, which sits at the core of the impeachment proceedings, wasn’t some off-the-cuff excursion — it was a calculated, at least months-long effort.
Todd asked the Senator, referring to the option of tasking U.S. authorities with looking into the issue:
‘And why do you think he didn’t do that?’
Alexander replied:
‘Maybe he didn’t know to do it… The bottom line is, it’s not an excuse, and he shouldn’t have done it, and I said he shouldn’t have done it, and now I think it’s up to the American people.’
Watch:
WATCH: @SenAlexander says “maybe [Trump] did not know how to” call the AG to look into Bidens and Burisma. #MTP@chucktodd: “At what point is he no longer new to this?
Sen. Alexander: “Well, the bottom line, it's not an excuse.” pic.twitter.com/CtZjdB8Cwj
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 2, 2020
Well, Alexander and his fellow Republicans can defer to the American people all they want, but polls have already shown that majorities of Americans — even including majorities or near-majorities of Republicans — wanted to see witnesses at the impeachment trial, but Alexander voted that down. Thus, in reality, he’s not protecting some kind of grand public interest. He’s protecting Trump.
Alexander commented to Todd:
“Hopefully [President Trump] will look at this and say, ‘OK, that was a mistake, I shouldn’t have done that.'”
Trump didn’t eat more than he should have at a family dinner! He didn’t mouth off to someone, or do any one of the million other trivial things that argument could apply to! He endangered the national security of the United States with his attempt to bribe Ukraine into investigating his opponents. That deserves a lot more serious attention than “oh, well, whatever.”
. @SenAlexander after voting against witnesses in the impeachment trial: "Did I need more evidence to conclude the president did what he did? I concluded no. … Hopefully [President Trump] will look at this and say, 'OK, that was a mistake, I shouldn't have done that.'"
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 2, 2020
