Executive Privilege an Polarization

I learned today, while listening to the Senate impeachment trial, that president trump has not actually invoked executive privilege yet.  Everyone's acting as if he has, and the White House counsel will probably use that excuse as the reason for not bothering to call witnesses.  They'll just invoke executive privilege, is what they're going to say.  The more I listened to the description of what is happening, the clearer things became to me.  In the Nixon and Clinton impeachment hearings, both presidents handed over a significant number of documents.  In fact, the executive privilege argument didn't hold up when it went to the supreme court.

Here's the bottom line.  President trump and the White House counsel are going to be making the case that a president can do anything he or she pleases, and congress can't investigate.  There's no question that this is what trump wants.  It's remarkable that the rest of the republicans seems to be supportive of this idea.  The shame is that if the Democrats take the presidency, they might one inclined to follow suit.

This all really made me refocus on how we've gotten to this extremely polarized situation.  I quickly find myself going back to Newt Gingrich and what he started when Bill Clinton became president.  It's ironic, but Clinton was also pretty narcissistic.  I also never liked the way that Bill Clinton treated women.  He loved the power of being a governor and then of being the president.  Ok, so we've begun to establish some consistency amongst presidential personalities.  The republicans began an investigation of a Clinton real estate investment called Whitewater. They didn't find anything, and one thing led to another.

The Clinton impeachment was extremely partisan.  It was essentially along party lines.  The "crime" that Clinton committed was perjury.  To this day, I still question whether Clinton actually committed perjury.  His statement "I never had sexual relations with that woman," was probably what he believed.  He didn't consider getting a blow job in the White House to be having sexual relations.  Even if he did lie under oath, he lied about having sex with a White House intern.  I won't even call it an affair, because it's never really been clear whether Bill and Hillary had an understanding.

Twenty years later and the Democrats started an investigation over whether the president abused his office by pressuring a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent. They're not investigating trumps affairs, or his other most likely unethical behavior.  They're impeaching him for the same thing they investigated him for.  They have the right to do so.  The republicans in the senate have the right to be partisan and vote to acquit.  I find it fascinating that they swore an oath, but what the heck!

Both sides have gotten us to this point.  The Democrats weren't very bipartisan under George W. Bush.  The Republicans weren't bipartisan under President Obama.  Ironically, the last modicum of bipartisanship occurred in the Clinton years, and look what that got him!  Maybe that's the point. Perhaps the fitting end result will be establishing a precedent that allows a president to get away with anything they want.  Republicans and Democrats can and will live with this forever.