Republican legislators know Trump clearly did wrong. Why stand by him during impeachment?

President Donald Trump’s conduct was far worse than any that has led to the impeachment of a president in American history. In the future, people will look back and wonder why Republicans stood by him in light of his serious abuse of power.

Twice before in American history a president has been impeached by the House of Representatives. President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure in Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson had been a Senator from Tennessee before the Civil War and was one of the few Southerners to oppose secession. In 1864, as an effort at unity, he was chosen to be the vice presidential candidate for Abraham Lincoln’s second term. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Johnson found himself presiding over the aftermath of the Civil War and the desired Reconstruction.

Johnson was enormously unpopular. One effort to reign in his powers was the Tenure in Office Act which was to prevent him from firing Lincoln’s Cabinet. In the face of Stanton’s open defiance, Johnson fired him. Within days, the House of Representatives voted articles of impeachment for this and the Senate came within one vote of the two-thirds majority needed to remove Johnson from office. Johnson committed no crime and exercised a power that the Supreme Court later held is inherent to the presidency: firing a Cabinet official.

Bill Clinton was the only other president to be impeached. His offense was lying under oath in a deposition about sex with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Although perjury is a crime, there were no allegations that Clinton had abused the powers of his office in connection with this. The Republican-controlled House voted impeachment, but the Senate voted overwhelmingly to not remove him from office.

In sharp contrast to these instances, President Trump faces impeachment for seriously abusing his powers. There is no dispute that President Trump, in a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the United States giving Ukraine $400 million in military aid, said, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” The favor was not to help the United States government, but to gather dirt on a potential political rival. Witnesses at the Intelligence Committee hearings – such as Gordon Sondland (U.S. Ambassador to the European Union), Fiona Hill (former official at the National Security Council), and William B. Taylor (head of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine) – were clear that Ukrainian officials were informed that military aid depended on their investigating Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

On Tuesday, December 3, the House Intelligence Committee issued a 300 page report that left no doubt as to what President Trump and his administration did. As a statement accompanying the report said in summarizing it: “The evidence is clear that President Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into his political rival, Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. These investigations were designed to benefit his 2020 presidential reelection campaign.” Furthermore, “the evidence is clear that after his scheme to secure foreign help in his reelection was uncovered, President Trump engaged in categorical and unprecedented obstruction in order to cover-up his misconduct.”

Indeed, it is a federal crime for someone to solicit the involvement of a foreign government in a federal election. But no crime is required for it to be an impeachable offense as a “high crime and misdemeanor.” In the words of Alexander Hamilton, the Constitution authorizes impeachment for “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

The closest parallel to the Trump impeachment effort was that directed at President Richard Nixon. The House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment for his having engaged in obstruction of justice with regard to the cover-up of the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate building. Nixon, though, resigned before the House of Representatives could vote on the articles of impeachment. For both Trump and Nixon the basis for the impeachment effort was a serious abuse of power.

But there also is a key difference. Throughout the investigation of Nixon, there was uncertainty about what the president knew and when he knew it. Only once the Supreme Court ordered the release of the White House tapes in August 1974 was there clear evidence of President Nixon engaging in obstruction of justice.

Unlike the Nixon impeachment, there is no question of what President Trump did. Why then are Republicans steadfast in their support, when even many Republicans ultimately abandoned Nixon? My guess is that it reflects our hyper-partisan times. I wish Republicans who oppose impeachment would ask themselves a simple question: if a Democratic President abused the powers of the office in the same way, would they still oppose impeachment?

This story was originally published December 14, 2019 at 5:00 AM.