SOURCE: NATIONAL REVIEW
URL:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/donald-trump-stormy-daniels-scandal-legal-consequences/by Andrew McCarthy
Would a $130,000 payment to buy a porn star’s silence violate campaign-finance laws?
Greetings from beautiful Orange County. We’re getting ready for the second of two Golden State events (we were in San Francisco yesterday), part of National Review Institute’s celebration of Bill Buckley’s legacy a decade after his passing.
For me, the road trip is tacked on to a longer-than-usual vacation. It has ended up being the longest break I have taken from writing in many years — maybe since I started writing full time 15 years ago. I am grateful for the time to think at length about things rather than trying to analyze them on the fly.
Even before detaching, I had mostly stopped watching television news, since there doesn’t seem to be much effort at straight news anymore. When the mainstream media fawned over the Obama administration, I was glad to have the conservative media as an alternative because much of the criticism was pointed and thoughtful. But now that we have an administration I usually agree with on policy led by a president who is, at best, a deeply flawed man, I find the cable coverage almost completely useless. Much of the opposition to Trump is unhinged — though, having had some time to reflect on it, the natural impulse of Trump critics to conflate policy disagreements with personal revulsion over Trump’s character is, if not excusable, at least understandable. Even Trump fans (and there are many we’ve visited with in California) tend to temper their praise with grumbling over the president’s antics. Meanwhile, much of conservative media sounds eerily like the mainstream media during the administration of Bill Clinton, even as comparisons to that deeply flawed man have become the leitmotif of Trump apologia.
On vacation, I contented myself with flipping through news sites and reading books — the best of which were Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic and David Bahnsen’s Crisis of Responsibility (and in the making-up-for-lost-time category, I’ve even almost finished Anna Karenina!). Sunday night’s 60 Minutes episode featuring the Stormy Daniels interview was the first news program I’ve watched in a while (mainly because it came on right after the Kansas–Duke thriller). I’ve been on the road ever since, so maybe the snippets of reactive coverage I’ve seen are not fully representative, but they have been awful.
It is simply not a defense of Trump to argue that Clinton did worse. President Clinton, as Fox commentators were wont to remind viewers not so long ago, was not impeached over sexual improprieties. He was impeached over illegal and unethical actions taken to cover up sexual improprieties, the untimely revelation of which might have cost him the presidency. Parading out Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones as a reminder of how bad Clinton was, and how indifferent the media was to how bad Clinton was, does not improve Trump’s perilous position. In the mid-to-late Nineties, we on the right full-throatedly argued that Clinton was unfit for office not merely because of the tawdry behavior (though that certainly was relevant), but because of the fraudulent abuses undertaken to conceal the tawdry behavior, some of which involved actionable misconduct.
The best argument in Trump’s favor is one that claims mitigation, not innocence. It involves the lesson from Clinton’s impeachment that I tried to draw in Faithless Execution: The further removed misconduct is from the core responsibilities of the presidency, the less political support there will be for the president’s removal from office.
This is critical because impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. The way the Framers designed the process — which requires just a simple House majority to file articles of impeachment, but a two-thirds Senate super-majority for removal — no president will ever be removed from office absent misconduct egregious enough to spur a consensus for removal that cuts across partisan lines. Such misconduct would surely have to involve either (a) an abuse of power involving core presidential powers; or (b) an extremely serious crime (if unrelated, or only tangentially related, to presidential power).
In making this point, I am obviously assuming that Stephanie Clifford (the pornographic actress better known as Stormy Daniels) is telling the truth about her central allegation: She had a sexual liaison with Trump and was paid $130,000 in hush money close to election time by an agent of candidate Trump (his lawyer, Michael Cohen).
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