PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite past-time – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Did I say my last post might, in fact, be my last on the impeachment process?

Yes, I did.  But I was wrong.

Here is another one.

I simply cannot avoid posting again given the incredible significance of what’s poised to happen in the U.S. Senate this week – acquitting Donald Trump despite the grievous actions he took to benefit himself, including in the 2020 election.

Senate acquittal will do nothing but embolden Trump.

Beyond demanding that Ukraine interfere in the election – with national security money held out as a brige — he went one up on that by asking China to do the same.

If you think he won’t do it again, think again.

Senate Republicans, who bowed at the altar of Trump, have had guts to say that the best approach, for all of us as Americans, is to allow the presidential election to go forward.

Sure.

We all should vote in an election that already has been tainted and, inevitably, will be tainted again.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post editorial writers came to different conclusions as impeachment nears its end.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“It is too low a constitutional bar for the House to claim, as it does, that Trump can be impeached because Democrats think his motives were corrupt. The acts themselves must qualify as ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ Trump’s acts don’t qualify—because asking aid recipients to investigate corruption isn’t illegal, and in any case the aid to Ukraine was delivered on time and no investigation of Joe Biden was started. T his does not condone Trump’s request, which was reckless and dumb, but it isn’t an impeachable offense.”

From the Washington Post:

“Republican senators who voted to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

“So cowed are Republicans that they have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.”

And this from the New York Times:

“Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson famously said, ‘you must kill him.’

“Trump’s foes struck at him but did not take him down.

“With the end of impeachment, a triumphant Trump emerges from the biggest test of his presidency emboldened, ready to claim exoneration and take his case of grievance, persecution and resentment to the campaign trail.”

Apart from the impeachment result – acquittal – the most convulsing impression for me over the last few weeks resides with the attorney, Alan Dershowitz, who always is seeking the limelight.

A Washington Post editorial said this about Dershowitz:

“When a lawyer for President Trump suggested to senators that whatever a president does in pursuit of re-election is inherently in the public’s interest, the moment crystallized fears among some of Trump’s critics about creeping presidential autocracy.

“’If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,’ said the lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.”

In this way, Dershowitz parrots Trump.

If something is good for Trump – in this case a tainted election – that that something is good for America. Because, remember, Trump is a great president and, thus, anything is does to promote his re-election equates to the public good.

What has happened over the last week in the impeachment trial contains huge risks for America. The main one is that it has now been confirmed by Congress – or, at least the U.S. Senate – that Trump can do whatever he wants without fear of recrimination.
To him, that even means shooting someone in the middle of Times Square.

It also means rigging the next election.

Only time will tell what Trump does next in his dictatorship.