Republicans Hoping for a Flag

 Republicans running out of way to defend Trump - NBC  News

Congressional committees continue to expose bad, corrupt, and often illegal behavior by the president and his cronies. Just to be clear, illegal means criminal.

President Trump’s effort to withhold military aid from Ukraine until they provided him with dirt on his potential political opponent, Joe Biden amounted to no less than inviting a foreign entity to interfere in an American election. This is a crime.

This crime was committed in part during a phone call between Trump and the newly elected Ukrainian president. It was made worse because the Mueller Investigation, just a few months earlier and Robert Mueller, himself, just a day earlier speaking before Congress had condemned Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.

No one in Trump’s circle, no Republican in Congress has made any effort to refute the accusations. The case appears to be very open and shut.

While not condoning his behavior, they are questioning the Democratic Congress’s method of investigating him—essentially attack the process. Questioning the motives of the whistle-blower, the closed hearings, and anything else.

This is not new. Crooks have been crying foul for as long as crooks have been committing crimes.

So what are they hoping to accomplish?

Muddy the waters is a common defense maneuver on par with comparing apples and oranges. It is not, however, a legal term although it is often a legal strategy. Attacking the process is the Republicans strategy to muddy the waters so to speak.

In a court of law, no judge would allow this, but impeachment is not a legal procedure. It is government’s answer to government misconduct. In fact, muddying the waters, comparing apples to oranges is practically the definition of how government works. In government, it is always about this with that in the background versus that with this attached. Politics is nothing if it is not muddy waters.

This still doesn’t tell us what Republicans hope to accomplish by arguing process in their defense against substance. To better understand what is going on in Washington, it would be helpful to look at what goes on in a football game.

Nothing about football is objective, from where the ball is placed down to what constitutes pass interference. Most subjective of all are the penalty calls.

If you are a coach who’s just seen a flag thrown on one of your players for holding, the best you can hope for is a defensive interference call downfield. One has nothing to do with the other, one may have been flagrant while the other incidental. None of this makes any difference. When both flags go down, both coaches breathe a sigh of relief because the results of the play are thrown out and the down is replayed.

It’s not perfect. It’s nowhere near being fair. A great completion by the offense might be lost by a picky holding call. A great stop by the defense might be wiped out by an inadvertent shove. Both penalties serve no purpose but to cancel the other out.

Republicans are hoping that a process penalty can cancel out the substance abuses. That won’t happen.

In a football game, official reviews have changed the game of football. It causes delays, but in the long run, fewer mistakes mean better outcomes.

The problem for Republicans is that checks and balances already exist in government. They are difficult sometimes to enforce and they do take time, but they do exist.

We are already seeing that the process is proceeding the way it should. Republicans can complain all they wish, but sooner or later, they will have to get off the field and allow the game to continue.

When the game does continue, the evidence, much of it already known, will confirm that laws were broken. The president will be seen as having pursued foreign intervention to help him beat an opponent. It is not the first time, but the penalty wasn’t called the first time. Rather than consider himself lucky, the president considered himself emboldened.

The substance of the Congressional investigation will also reveal obstruction and abuse of power. These penalties will not be offset by Congressional stunts or lame complaining.

 Republicans on the sidelines can scream all they want, shake their heads and throw their clipboards to the ground, but the game is rapidly ending and the president is losing.

Goods teams lose all the time. Even so-so teams that think they are good, not just good but perfect, also lose. For Republicans, the only question is do they accept defeat or go down as poor losers. We know what Trump will do. Hell, on Inauguration Day 2016, he showed himself to be a poor winner. My feeling is that Republicans, as a team, are in such disarray, that being poor losers is their only option. The good news is poor losers never effect the outcome because process never trumps substance.