The forgotten tragedy of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial – whether the U.S. Senate finds its soul and allows a full and fair hearing complete with government-withheld documents and witnesses – is that our elections still remain vulnerable to foreign interference.
We know it. And our government is doing little to nothing about it – unless you consider our president’s invitations to those foreigners to keep right on interfering as doing something. Unless you consider Republican Senate members’ serial votes to table Democrats’ requests for new subpoenas of pertinent documents and witnesses.
Thanks to the Senate’s habit of calling for roll-call votes in alphabetical order, we also heard loud and clear our senators’ votes to ignore justice and fairness. Tennessee Republicans Lamar Alexander and Marsha Blackburn, along with Georgia Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue wasted no breaths voting to table Democratic motions seeking witnesses and evidentiary documents at the front end of the president’s trial.
We’re nearly four years out from Trump inviting “Russia, if you’re listening … ,” and that country’s next-day hacking of computers at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to cheat in his 2016 election. Now we’re just months away from our nation’s 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, we’re right now watching the president’s impeachment trial, based on his ask of Ukraine in July to investigate his top 2020 Democratic opponent and find evidence to discredit the Mueller probe’s finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Reasonable people would expect that securing American elections against foreign interference – forget securing our free and fair elections from a corrupt and cheating president – ought be an urgent and bipartisan priority.