Trump's corruption policy: let's be as corrupt as the rest of the world

A version was published in the Winter Park Times, January 23, 2020
https://winterparktimes.com/opinion/columnists/lets-be-as-corrupt-as-the-rest-of-the-world/

Trump's corruption policy is not to fight corruption in foreign countries, but to make America as corrupt as the rest of the world. Now, we have a president who wants to permit US companies to bribe foreign officials in order to get business contracts abroad. US is already no angel at home. Foreigners often point to the US campaign finance system that makes corruption legal through lax campaign contribution rules and expensive election campaigns.

This is in the midst of an impeachment process where corruption in Ukraine is viewed as a bad thing. and the president has been charged with  a form of bribery of the Ukrainian president  (called "pressuring" in the articles of impeachment described in the abuse of power section). Trump is accused of withholding needed  military aid and a visit to the White House in order to give incentives for  the Ukrainian president  to find dirt on the presidents' likely 2020 opponent and to announce the undertaking of the investigation publicly.

At the top of the anti-corruption measures was a 1977 law forbidding  US citizens to bribe foreign government officials in order to get contracts and business. Bribery is viewed as a criminal act, whether in our country or abroad. Since 2017, President Trump has been advocating overturning the Corrupt Practices Act. This year Larry Kudlow, Director of the president's National Economic Council, said the President is looking into the possibility of overturning the 1977 anti-bribery law by using administrative measures. Trump called the anti-bribery statute unfair since it puts US corporations at a disadvantage in vying for contracts abroad when they are competing against bidders who have no such constraints or scruples. From a businessman's perspective, it is much easier to do business with corrupt governments because a bribe will get you around inconvenient zoning and financing restrictions if you know which official who is open to certain under-the-table offers and who are close to the ruler or power structure.

At the same time, campaign donations are being raised for certain GOP Senators acting as jurors in the President's impeachment trial who pledge to vote to acquit in advance of the trial itself. According to an investigative report of Senators benefitting by these special fundraising efforts are those who are facing tough  re-election campaigns in purple states who may feel inclined to waffle on acquitting the president in the trial. The Hill that obtained the fundraising appeal letter.  Among those who are targeted for campaign funds raised by Donald Trump and the GOP in this special effort is our own Colorado senator Cory Gardner.  There is nothing illegal about this, nor this does not mean Gardner is corrupt, but it is an example of the difficulties that Senators have in bucking Trump if they wanted to vote to acquit and it reveals  the power of campaign contributions as a party discipline weapon. The amount of money needed to campaign successfully is enormous given the cost of advertising and the length of the campaign season. Reforms are needed in both of those cost generating factors. The recent Citizen's United decision by the US Supreme Court that overturned the federal law forbidding campaign contributions by corporations to candidates has only made that form of legalized corruption of the legislative process worse as money more easily can flow to campaign coffers.

The question on the table is what kind of a country do we want to be? The uncorrupt standard for the rest of the world or do we want to be a country that is as corrupt as the actors we so piously condemn?  Not only must we not let the Trump administration legalize bribery abroad, but we should start cleaning house in reforming campaign finance laws at home.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/31/trump-impeachment-senators-donor-062084

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/donald-trump-bribery-laws

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/478846-kudlow-says-trump-looking-at-reforming-law-on-bribing-foreign

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/economy/trump-bribery-law.h

https://fortune.com/2018/11/30/trump-putin-penthouse-moscow/

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/new-poll-shows-majority-of-coloradans-support-impeachment-inquiry-hickenlooper-leads-gardner

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/10/us/politics/articles-impeachment-document-pdf.html#g-page-2

Sen. Cory Gardner is no profile in courage, Blog posting 10/2019

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-illegal-bribe-law-changes-052319359.html?.tsrc=jtc_news_index&ncid=facebook_yahoonewsf_akfmevaatca

Impeachment? Not so fast

A version of this was published in the Sky Hi News Dec. 11-12, 2018
https://www.skyhinews.com/news/opinion/opinion-muftic-impeachment-not-so-fast/

Immediately last Friday after Michael Cohen’s sentencing memo was filed, President Trump crowed he was cleared and the opposition media claimed there were grounds for impeachment because the President was in effect an unindicted co-conspirator of a crime, which was closer to reality. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s court filings regarding Paul Manafort were either redacted or sealed, revealing little.

Often cited are precedents set by both the impeachment of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.   Neither Nixon nor Clinton was found guilty or was removed from office by Congressional votes. A simple majority in the House can vote to impeach,  but  two-thirds of the Senate must  agree to find him guilty and remove him from office.

 Impeachment is not so much a matter of law  as it is a political action. Voters’ opinions can  give members of Congress political backbones: Clinton’s public  job approval ratings polled  during the impeachment/trial remained over 70% and 66% were against removing him from office over the issue of lying and coverup of sexual misconduct.   Nixon, after release of the tapes, dropped from winning the prior election to  a 31%  job approval with 43% opposing removal from office.  During Nixon’s threatened impeachment, Democrats , the opposition party, controlled both House and Senate with significant majorities. Republican Nixon  resigned before the House could vote  to impeach because tapes were made public that confirmed his guilt. Like Nixon, Clinton's  opposition party, Republicans,  controlled both the Senate and the House though the vote even in the GOP controlled Senate fell short of the two thirds needed and he was acquitted. In Donald Trump's case, the House will be in the hands of Democrats ; the Senate's majority party is Trump's.

The current  public mood  should give the GOP shudders. It is similar to Nixon’s. The key public voter question is whether the actions of the President as charged by Congress  justifies his removal from office , which is the end result of a Senate conviction.  Trump’s  current job approval is around 40% with 42% opposed to his removal from office per a June 2018 poll.  This is  before we know much of what  Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found.

 That Democrats gained a decisive majority in the House of Representatives in  November means they have the simple majority  of votes  needed to impeach Trump  without any GOP help  At this moment it is a debatable intra party question of whether impeachment is an effective political strategy, distracting from promoting their public policy  agenda.  GOP control of the Senate would block removal of the president  at this time in any case. 

So far, public knowledge of facts implicating Trump is thin. Recently filed  court documents do indicate  business financial gain could have been his motivation to commit crimes of conspiracy/collusion and obstruction of justice.  The closest to fingering Donald Trump himself came  last week in the Michael Cohen case filings in which Cohen claimed he was instructed by the President  to break campaign finance  laws.  That  the President intended  to pay for silence of women with whom he had affairs was to protect family peace, not campaign purposes as Cohen claims, could be a reasonable  defense.   Whether the public would think lying and coverup of sexual misdeeds  alone justifies  removing  him from office is  very questionable.    It makes sense to wait for Mueller’s report and findings of Democratic dominated House  committees.
______________________________________________________________________________
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/22/politics/impeach-trump-nixon-support-bill-clinton-poll/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Richard_Nixon
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/29/politics/michael-cohen-guilty-plea-misleading-congress/index.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-tower-moscow-it-was-the-end-of-a-long-failed-push-to-invest-in-russia-1543532455

Footnotes: On Friday, December 7, 2018  the Southern District of New York's sentencing memo regarding Michael Cohen repeated the charge that Cohen committed a crime by arranging a method to pay off two women who knew of Trump's immoral and unfaithful conduct  for the principal purpose  that they would remain silent during the campaign. Significantly, the SDNY filing said that Cohen committed the crime under the direction of the president.  This could be very damning for the president, though he cannot be indicted for doing it. Any punishment would have to be through the impeachment process. Trump claimed immediately he was "totally cleared". .  The SDNY filings regarding Cohen said that he had been helpful, but not fully. The Mueller fillings said Coehn had been helpful on  the Russian conncection and that Cohen's jail term could be served at the same time as the judge ruled in the SDNY case.
Both the Clinton impeachment case and the Michael Cohen/Trump charges involved lying and covering up sexual misconduct.  Some Republicans voted not to convict Clinton, and all Democrats stood by their man.  Later public opinion polls showed 57% the public did not want Clinton to lose his job over the issue and they considered the impeachment harmful to the country (Gallup via Wikipedia summary)
The Mueller filings regarding Manafort pointed to lies  to the Special Counsel about his coordination with the White  House in 2018 and lies about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, his associate, who had ties with Russian military intelligence, the DNC hackers.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/michael-cohen-robert-mueller-donald-trump/index.html

Also see the prior blog posting 12/3/2018. The tangled web of Trump-Russian deceit.

If sexual misconduct, lying and coverup did not reach the "time does not fit the crime" in the Cllinton case , i.e. the offense was not the reason for the Senate to convict because it was not serious enough and the administration's ability to conduct business (high job approval rating), then the "high crimes" needed to be something worse.  Worse could be  treason, bribery and a serious high crime...definition is up to the House to say what it is. What would be "high" enough to warrant a Senate conviction?  Look for  proof beyond reasonable doubt of treason  (collusion, conspire) to work against US, bribery..a tit for tat like: Russia will help Trump win if he gets sanctions against Russians lifted; money lauundering, emoluments clause violations, tax evasion, and whatever else the House defines.   Another nagging problem is can a President be impeached for what he did before he took office?  The other problem: the DOJ has its own rules that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime, but nothing in the Constitution forbids this. If the offenses took place before the President was sworn in, he could be indicted after he left office and prosecuted, though. 

A liberal's tribute to Sen. Tom Coburn

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Republican, is quitting the Senate after this Congressional session  two years short of his second term.  This will be a big loss because we need those in Washington who represent various viewpoints with sane, objective, fact based analyses, who express themselves without flame throwing clever phrases,  and speak not from someone else's prepared talking points. His annual reports on waste ought to be the basis of good government scrutiny; his viewpoints are expressed in clear, well thought out argumentation. I listen to him.  I, a professed liberal, often disagree with his positions, but I take him seriously, not because he is an effective  threat,   but because he elevates the debate.
  There are some things more important than being the majority in a legislative body (of course it makes it easier to get an agenda passed).  It is passing legislation that has been thoroughly examined for its impact on whom or its unintentional consequences and  what is in our national interest. That takes compromise and fair debate. This is what our country's founders thought they were establishing.
 Instead, what our country has become in this new century is entrenched in divisions.  Divisions of ideological differences were present in the late 1700's, but political parties had not yet become organizations that could bring discipline and uniform ideologically based political correctness in thought and expression to its members. Since then modern technology has become the enabler of stubborn and earlier unimagined divisive politics.
  Gerrymandered districts with boundaries drawn to give one side an easy win, make for few seriously contested general elections, throwing the important contests into primaries with only the most active party members  usually participating. Laws to keep this from happening are weak or nonexistent. Our cable TV and radio talkers have contributed mightily to the extreme divisiveness, sometimes shaping partisan positions and disseminating them to the already in tune choir. Views are often expressed in certain phrases, uniform and approved by whatever political power in the form of "think tanks" and politically operative special or single interest pressure groups dictate.  Debates about issues then become carefully choreographed dances designed to elicit the most applause from the audience, an audience makeup known in advance by focus groups and polls.
 Another enabler of divisiveness is our permissive campaign finance system. Contributions    fed into certain races by pressure groups outside or within the election district are now protected by court decisions.   Deep pocket corporations and unions are now called "people" covered by free speech. Social policy organizations who attempt to affect a specific election's outcome by running advertising under the pious guise of "education", can use faux facts and well-crafted scare mongering with impunity of legal action and often without an equal time rebuttal by less well funded opponents, given the cost of media exposure. Those “education” groups can operate without disclosure of their funders until late in the game or not at all so voters have no chance to look behind their curtains.  The insatiable need for campaign money means partisan, ideological or self-serving   issue groups can wield effective discipline to keep any wannabe maverick from going off message. Tom Coburn has represented the views of his state well, but he was above so many of these political practices,  that this is another reason why his leaving will be such a loss.
(Personal note:  I am a graduate of Muskogee Central High School ..1956; born and raised in Muskogee, Oklahoma, though living elsewhere since then.  Tom Coburn and I come from  the same home town)