Let’s start with three general propositions:
The political darkness afflicting America may be focused right now on Donald Trump, but he is also an expression of what’s gone wrong in the Republican Party in these times over the past generation. It is therefore not only Donald Trump who should be the target of the Democrats’ ongoing effort to restore basic decency and respect for our institutions to the nation, but also this “Trump Party.” If the Dems were to get rid of Trump, but leave this morally bankrupt Republican Party in a stronger position to continue their destructive impact on our politics, that would represent a highly regrettable missed opportunity. The history of the past generation has been filled with such missed opportunities, as the Democrats have almost continually treated the Republicans in Congress with more courtesy and less outrage than the Republican conduct has warranted.All that being said, let’s turn to the particulars.
The Republicans apparently are continuing to clamor for the identity of the Ukraine whistleblower. Not only is it contrary to the whistleblower law, which protects the anonymity of people who follow the procedures laid out for whistleblowers (as this Ukraine-gate whistleblower did), the Republicans demand seems explicable only in altogether reprehensible terms.
If the Whistleblower’s testimony were standing alone, as a basis for establishing Trump’s culpability, one could conceivably make a case that the constitutional right of “the accused ...to be confronted with the witnesses against him" might supersede the whistleblower’s right to remain anonymous.
But that is not the case at all.
The whistleblower directed the nation’s attention to the Ukraine scandal, but in the weeks since, virtually everything the whistleblower disclosed as been repeatedly corroborated by other witnesses.
The whistleblower is now functionally irrelevant to the impeachment task at hand. So why are Republicans still making an issue of the whistleblower’s identity? ‘
The only plausible answer that I can imagine is that they want to punish the whistleblower in ways that will deter any potential additional whistleblowers from daring to tell the nation of wrong-doing in the Trump administration that they think we need to hear.
(If there’s another plausible explanation, I’d like to hear it.)
The Republicans, in other words, are engaged in yet another of their assaults on the truth, attempting to use intimidation as a kind of preemptive cover-up.
Such an effort is indefensible, and the Democrats should be hitting them over the head with it. “What reason do you Republicans have for wanting to expose this whistleblower, except the attack him or her so as to intimidate other witnesses to crimes that should be exposed.”