Day 1,016: Art of the pivot: some Senate GOP ready to admit Trump wrongdoing in Ukraine, but deny illegality
As evidence of Donald Trump’s malfeasance in the Ukraine scandal grows by the day, Republicans are growing more wary of having to defend Trump’s actions as totally harmless. Their story keeps shifting: from nothing wrong, to no quid pro quo, to issues with the impeachment process itself to today’s latest.
The new story: yes quid pro quo, but nothing illegal.
A growing number of Senate Republicans are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo.
In this shift in strategy to defend Trump, these Republicans are insisting that the president’s action was not illegal and does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense as the Democratic-led House moves forward with the open phase of its probe.
The big problem with that strategy is the message doesn’t align with Trump’s argument that there was no quid pro quo. Republicans’ argument would sit on a razor’s edge of acceptableness, perched between an impossible standard for impeachment and the insanity of Trump trying to force a foreign country to investigate a political foe for foreign aid allocated by Congress.
Inside the lunch, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who ran against Trump in 2016, said a quid pro quo is not illegal unless there is “corrupt intent” and echoed Kennedy’s argument that such conditions are a tool of foreign policy.
This has never been a tool of foreign policy. Cruz and the rest of the GOP are trying to spin, duck and cover, desperate to find a narrative that catches on with the American public. Having found no dice thus far, they want to make an admission, but heavily qualify it and excuse it by creating a new standard.
If the past few months have been any proof, it likely won’t be long until there’s a new story Republicans are selling.
1,016 days in, 446 to go
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