The Wisconsin State Journal Gets It Completely Wrong In Editorial Against Impeachment

The Editorial Board admits Trump probably performed impeachable actions, yet wants to wait until next year's elections, ignoring the outcome of last year's at the same time.  

I am beyond livid over the Wisconsin State Journal's decision to publish an editorial against the impeachment of the president ("Trust voters to end the sad Trump era"). Not only because the board is wrong, but because their argument is full of contradictions.

The overall thesis of the piece reads,

"[L]eaving Trump’s presidency up to voters is best for democracy, given public skepticism over the House’s rushed impeachment process."

Then, THE VERY NEXT LINE reads,

"The facts suggest President Trump did commit impeachable offenses."

One would think that'd be enough for the State Journal's Editorial Board to embrace impeachment, as dozens of newspapers across the country have already done. Alas, that's not the case with Wisconsin's capital-city publication, whose board believes that timing, not criminality or abuse of power, matters most.




The "democracy" argument doesn't hold up for an important reason, one that the Wisconsin State Journal doesn't address: we've already had an election, in 2018, when voters across the nation chose Democrats to take over the House of Representatives. The American people voted to have a Democratic-led House be a "check" on the president...which includes the power of impeachment, if necessary.

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

The framers of our Constitution laid out no rules on when an impeachment can occur, nor said that presidents can't be impeached within a year of the next election cycle.

Yes, there can exist a plausible situation in which impeachment could be used for political purposes by one party against the other, but this is not that situation. As the WSJ Editorial Board stated itself, Trump's actions are impeachable in nature, seeing as he attempted to coerce a nation into investigating one of his own rivals for political gain, and subsequently obstructed Congress' investigation into the matter by blocking subpoenas from the co-equal branch of government.

Furthermore, it's not Democrats' faults if the GOP-led Senate doesn't agree with the Editorial Board's own assessment on the president's conduct. They're the ones who are wrong, and the Board's editorial perhaps should have focused on them instead, by pointing out that impeachment was warranted, and that the Senate's actions were off-the-mark.

The Editorial Board ought to stand up for what it knows is right instead of questioning if it's the right time. This president is a detriment to our democracy, and is actively trying to get other nations to interfere in next year's elections. Waiting until then to punish his abhorrent behavior sends the wrong message for future generations of our nation.

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