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The Democrats believe that the 2020 election is too important to be left to the voters. Its obvious that President Trump withheld defense aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to commit to the investigations that he wanted, an improper use of his power that should rightly be the focus of congressional investigation and hearings.

Where the Democrats have gotten tangled up is trying to find a justification that supports the enormous weight of impeaching and removing a president for the first time in our history.

Theyve cycled through different arguments. First, Trumps offense was said to be a quid pro quo a phrase cast aside for supposedly being too Latin for the public to understand. Then it was bribery, which has lost ground lately, presumably because of the inherent implausibility of the charge.

Now, the emphasis is on Trumps invitation to the Ukrainians to meddle and interfere in our elections.

This is posited to be an ongoing threat. Nancy Pelosi said in her statement calling on the House to draft articles of impeachment: Our democracy is what is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act, because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit. The president has engaged in abuse of power undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said on Meet the Press last weekend that Trump has to be impeached for posing the considerable risk that he poses to the next election. Asked if he thinks the 2020 election will be on the up-and-up, he said, I dont know. The president, based on his past performance, will do everything he can to make it not a fair election.

The gravamen of this case is that the election is too crucial to allow the incumbent president of the United States, who is leading in key battleground states and has some significant chance of winning, to run. In fact, the integrity of the election is so at risk that the US Senate should keep the public from rendering a judgment on Trumps first term or deciding between him and, say, his nemesis Joe Biden.

Of course, its possible to imagine a circumstance where a president would indeed present such a grave risk to our elections that hed have to be removed. This is a reason that we have the impeachment process in the first place.

But whats the real harm that Trumps foolhardy Ukraine adventure presented?

Lets say that Ukraine had, in response to Trump pressure, actually announced an investigation into Burisma, a shady company that had in the past been under investigation. What would have happened? Would Joe Biden have been forced from the race? Would his numbers have collapsed in Nevada and South Carolina, his best early states? Would his numbers have changed anywhere?

No, its not even clear there would have been any additional domestic political scrutiny of Hunter Bidens lucrative arrangement with Burisma, an issue that is dogging the former vice president on the campaign trail anyway because his sons payday was so clearly inappropriate.

The bottom line is that after tsk-tsking Trump for refusing to say in advance that hed accept the outcome of the 2016 election, Democrats have steadfastly refused to truly accept the 2016 result, allegedly the work of the Russians, and now are signaling they wont accept next years election, either, should they lose again.

Given their druthers, Trump wouldnt be an option for the voters. They are rushing their impeachment, in part, because they know that as November 2020 approaches, it becomes steadily less tenable to portray the man who wants to run in an election as the threat to democracy and the people who want to stop him as its champions.

With every day that passes, the Democrats risk a growing perception that they themselves are a threat to the 2020 election.

Twitter: @RichLowry

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Dems' impeachment absurdities are making them look like the threat to democracy - New York Post

Former U.K. Finance Minister Philip Hammond seen in July, 2019.

WIktor Szymanowicz | NurPhoto | Getty Images

The U.K.'s reputation as a pillar of political stability has certainly been tarnished by the Brexit crisis, according to the country's former finance minister, but a "sensible" departure from the European Union might eventually be seen as "democracy in action."

Speaking to CNBC's Dan Murphy at the SALT Conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, Philip Hammond said there can be "no doubt" that the U.K.'s reputation as a haven of stability had been "dented" by Brexit, "but there is all to play for."

His comments come just two days before voters in the U.K. head to the ballot box. The vote is likely to decide whether the world's fifth-largest economy leaves the bloc next month or moves toward another EU referendum.

"If we now demonstrate that we can deliver a sensible Brexit that satisfies the millions of people who voted to leave the European Union, that does it in a way that protects the U.K. economy, then actually, when a few years have elapsed and people look back, maybe they will see this as an example of democracy in action rather than a system in meltdown," Hammond said.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to frame the upcoming ballot as the "Brexit election," promising to deliver his so-called "oven-ready" divorce deal and take the country out of the EU by Jan. 31.

In contrast, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has said that, if elected, his left-leaning Labour party would hold another EU referendum within six months. This vote would offer Britain the choice between a "credible" renegotiated leave deal including a customs union and close single market relationship with the EU or the option to remain.

Johnson's center-right Conservative government holds a commanding lead in the latest opinion polls and Hammond expects the former London mayor to secure a working parliamentary majority later this week.

"The question for me is what Boris Johnson will do with the undoubted authority that he will gain from being the first Conservative prime minister for 25 years to obtain a decent working majority in parliament."

The Houses of Parliament on October 23, 2019 in London, England.

Peter Summers | Getty Images News | Getty Images

The last Conservative Party leader to form a single-party government with a parliamentary majority was David Cameron in 2015, when the former prime minister unexpectedly secured a slender 11-seat majority in 2015. Hammond appeared to be referring to John Major's parliamentary majority of 21 seats in the 1992 general election.

"He can use that to deliver a Brexit which protects the British economy, allows him to deliver on many of his ambitions for public services, for reduced taxation. Or, he can use it to deliver a hard Brexit which means that we will struggle to deliver on those promises because the economy will be in a much worse position," Hammond said.

"So, it is going to be all up to him to decide how to interpret Brexit once we have left the European Union," he added.

Hammond, who lost the Conservative Party whip in October after opposing to leave the EU without a deal, has repeatedly clashed with Johnson over Brexit.

Last month, the former finance minister said in a letter to his constituents in Runnymede and Weybridge that it was with "great sadness" he would step down as a Member of Parliament (MP) at the upcoming election.

In an apparent swipe at more hard-line Conservative lawmakers, Hammond said he would continue to promote a "broad-based, forward-looking, pro-business and pro-markets center-right party."

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Brexit might one day be seen as 'democracy in action,' former UK finance minister says - CNBC

After the Bolivian military forced out Evo Morales as president last month, following a wave of demonstrations protesting fraud in his fourth presidential election, the right-wing Catholic politician Jeanine Aez Chavez, second vice president of the Bolivian Senate, was deemed next in the line of succession and sworn in as his replacement.

Ms. Aez pledged to bring back democracy and tranquillity, but she instead embarked on a blatantly revanchist, ruthless path, stacking her cabinet with religious conservatives bitterly opposed to Mr. Moraless Movement for Socialism, breaking ties with the left-wing governments of Cuba and Venezuela and dispatching an ambassador to a gleeful Trump administration, the first in Washington in 11 years.

She issued a decree exempting security forces from criminal prosecution when maintaining public order; the following day, eight protesters were killed in a lethal crackdown, and more have been killed since.

At the same time, Mr. Moraless legions of Indigenous followers sealed off access to their region, where he comes from, with scores of barricades and vowed to give the government no peace until he returns.

Mr. Morales became Bolivias first Indigenous leader when he was elected 14 years ago, breaking the monopoly on power of a small elite of European descent. He sharply reduced the poverty rate, expanded the economy and helped introduce a new, more equitable constitution.

Then he overreached, calling a referendum in 2016 to lift constitutional term limits he himself had supported and, when the vote went against him, getting a Constitutional Court filled with his followers to rule that term limits violated his human rights.

The flawed election on Oct. 20 followed. Early suspicions of fraud by the Organization of American States helped fuel the protests and provided cover for the military to suggest that Mr. Morales leave office.

Last week the O.A.S. issued an audit, to which Mr. Morales had agreed, substantiating those suspicions and finding a series of malicious operations aimed at altering the will expressed at the polls on Oct. 20.

The Bolivian legislature has passed a law, with support from Mr. Moraless party and signed by Ms. Aez, paving the way toward new elections within a few months, with Mr. Morales barred from running.

Mr. Morales, who is now in Cuba, has agreed to renounce his candidacy, though he continues to claim, as he told The Guardian newspaper, I have every right to it.

Renouncing any candidacy is the right way for him to help restore peace and democracy in a country for which he has done so much. There is no clear successor on the left, so Mr. Morales should focus on finding a worthy successor in his party who could hold off an inevitable challenge from the far right.

Ms. Aez, for her part, can make clear that her dubious leap from obscurity was not the coup that her opponents claim it was by abandoning her vindictive policies and fulfilling her promise to arrange a free and fair election. Anything less would mark a sad relapse to the era of serial coups and counter-coups that ravaged Bolivia, often with the clandestine participation of the C.I.A.

A continued standoff would only exacerbate the countrys deep ethnic and ideological polarization. Mr. Moraless fall thrust Bolivia into the center of a left-right struggle convulsing much of the Americas. Seeing that resolved through the democratic process, rather than outside meddling, should be the goal of the United States and Bolivias Latin American neighbors.

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Restore Bolivian Democracy and Break Its History of Coups - The New York Times

But, while impeachment is kind of a break glass in case of emergency procedure, there's still several elements of the democratic process within it, Hermes said. It is necessary, he added, to have some means of removing a federal official before the end of their term. Hermes offers a solution to the argument that impeachment is undemocratic by pointing out the possibility of removing or changing the impeachment clause through the amendment process if people are unhappy with it.

Congress views have little to do with impeachment, Timothy Johnson, a political science and law professor, said. Members of Congress are vessels through which the Constitution acts to hold officials accountable. Its their duty, he said, to investigate if officials display signs of abuse of power. To the question of whether impeachment is democratic or undemocratic, Johnson answered, Its neither. Its actually just part of the Constitution.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, supports the impeachment inquiry. We have a constitutional duty to follow the facts, she said, and I cannot think of anything more important right now that we have to do. She calls attention to James Madisons words from the Constitutional Convention. Madison was fearful that the president might one day betray our country to a foreign power for their own gain.

This takes us back to when the Constitution was created and how it was intended to be applied. Democracy means rule by the people, according to political science professor Lisa Hilbink, whose research and teaching focus on democratization and judicial role in democracy. Hilbink pointed out its important to know who the people are and how they rule before we can define what makes a democracy.

Myers said that people often interpret democracy as whatever the majority of people voted for, and added that it is a very simplistic understanding of what it means to be a constitutional democracy.

Our democracy, Hilbink explained, was designed with the recognition that what the people of one state want may differ from what the people of another state want, and that any majority constituted at the national level should not be allowed to trample on or eliminate the rights of the minority.

This provokes the questionIs the duty of a representative to go up there and literally represent what their constituents would do, Myers said, or is the duty of the representative to exercise independent judgement and do what they think is best, or in this case what they think best fulfills the constitutional duty theyre supposed to carry out?

As has become very clear over the past several years, what keeps our democracy running smoothly are not detailed rules, Hilbink said, but rather, informal normsof honesty, respect for political rivals and opponents, and forbearance.

While the impeachment process has not changed, the society during which we apply it has. The political climate has become more polarized in recent years. Myers and Johnson both believe we cant separate political environment from impeachment attempts, which are sometimes linked to policy disagreement. During Clintons impeachment inquiry, there were 31 Democrats who voted in favor. During Trumps impeachment inquiry, one Republican spoke in favor. Today the line between Democrats and Republicans is more palpable than ever. Its rare for a politician to stray from their party, regardless of the issue. In some situations, the divide can go as far as people choosing party loyalty over listening to the facts.

Political scientists have a term that can describe the current political climate: regime cleavage. It is a divide in the population caused by disagreement over the governing systemthe constitutional democracy. What used to be arguments over partisan issues has morphed into the question of democracy itself.

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There's No I in Democracy - The Wake

On June 3, the sit-in was attacked. Exact lines of responsibility for what is now referred to as the Khartoum massacre are the subject of an independent investigation, but victims I spoke with told of gang beatings by the governments Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia carrying sticks, and being shot at by sniper fire from a nearby building. The dead bodies of protesters, weighed down by bricks, were later retrieved from the Nile. Incredibly, the protesters did not give up. On June 30, they reclaimed the streets in a million-person march, 30 years to the day since Bashir had taken power in a military coup.

The June 30 march will go down as a defining moment in this period of Sudanese history. The Khartoum massacre showed that the brutality of Bashirs regime could survive his ouster; June 30 showed that this was something the protesters were unwilling to accept. Subsequent negotiations between the military and an umbrella coalition of civil-society groups, known as the Forces for Freedom and Change, led to a transitional government that would take the country through to democratic elections in 2022. Thetransitional arrangementdoes not, however, establish complete civilian control of the government, as the protesters had sought.

A cabinet of technocrats runs the day-to-day bureaucratic administration, but the head of state is an 11-person Sovereignty Council, composed of five military members and six civilians. Its leader is Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan; his deputy is the RSF militia leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, who is notorious for his role in the latter stages of atrocities in Darfur. In the final 18 months before the 2022 elections, the Sovereignty Council will be led by one of its civilian members. The arrangement is a second-best option, but it is what the current balance of power will bear.

Over three decades of rule, Bashirs regime decimated the countrys human, financial, and natural resources. Now, the transitional government is tasked with laying the foundations for a new Sudan underpinned by the three pillars of the revolution: freedom, peace, and justice. The transitional arrangement lists a mandate of 16 bullet points, including directives such as Resolve the economic crisis by stopping economic deterioration and Dismantle the June 1989 regimes structure for consolidation of power (tamkeen), and build a state of laws and institutions. It is a herculean undertaking, even if they get the full three years of the transition period to work on itand its not at all clear they will. The coming months will likely decide whether Sudanese democracy will die before its ever born.

There are many potential ways that Sudan could fail to arrive at its scheduled democratic elections in 2022. The first threat comes from the National Congress Party (NCP) and its supporters. The transitional government recently passed a law that dissolved the NCP, but this does not mean that members of the NCP will exit the political landscape. Former NCP members are prohibited from participating in the new Legislative Council, but they can still do much to undercut the reforms that the transitional government seeks to make. From outside the government, NCP supporters are pushing their messaging out through mosques and social media. The goal seems to be to sway citizens against the transitional government, claiming its members are intent on undermining traditional Sudanese culture by creating a secular state that respects human rights. And from inside the government, concerns of a deep state within the bureaucracy have credence; while many bureaucrats no doubt have no love lost for the NCP, there are certainly others who will stonewall change.

Another risk is that established political elites may call for early elections. Under the terms of the transitional arrangement no one in the cabinet or Sovereignty Council can run in the 2022 elections. This means that the established opposition parties, formed before and during Bashirs reign, have little direct power during the transitional period. The theory behind this arrangement is that the three-year transition will give the younger generation, many of whom only became politically engaged during the revolution, time to prepare for electoral campaigning. The sooner elections are held, the more likely it is that the established political parties will win.

Complicating matters further, the army, RSF, and internal security forces all have competing loyalties, interests, and cultures, opening up the possibility of different parts of the security sector going into battle against each other. Notwithstanding the revolution, the entire security sector remains shrouded in secrecy, with off-the-books financial flows that make accountable governance impossible. As it stands, outside actors ranging from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to the European Union have provided Sudan with financial support for services provided by the RSF. Contingents of the RSF militia serve as mercenaries in Yemen, and were enlisted by EU partners to help counter human trafficking operations in Sudan and the surrounding region (though this is reportedly nowsuspended). Internally, the financial flows are harder to track. The RSFs involvement in illegal smuggling operations range from gold (from theDarfuri minesthat Hemeti owns) toweapons(bought by the neighboring Central African Republic). Until this sector is opened to scrutiny, no civilian-led government will be safe from the threat of a takeover.

Next, there are the as-yet unresolved conflicts throughout the peripheral parts of the country. Reaching peace deals with armed groups from The Blue Nile to Darfur is essential, not only forstability, but also to enable the transitional government to realize the revolutions goal of building an inclusive state. The transitional government has put the formation of the new Legislative Council on hold while peace agreements are being negotiated so that representatives from the peripheral regions can participate. This is a wise move in the short term, but the Legislative Councils formation cant be delayed indefinitely.

Finally, there is the ever-present risk that the people who made the revolution happen will withdraw their support for the transition if they see no meaningful improvements in their daily lives. This makes economic recovery the transitional governments number one priority in a crowded list of urgent tasks. As one of the leaders of the protest movement put it to me, The people showed extraordinary bravery and so expect extraordinary results.

Of course, even if the transitional government does manage to make it through the next three years, theres no telling it will succeed at its task of transitioning the country to democracy. On a recent trip to Sudan, it quickly became clear just how challenging it is to implement ideals of freedom, peace, and justice against a backdrop of 30 years of dictatorial rule.

Yet the scale of the challenge is precisely what makes Sudan such a vital experiment. Everyone agrees that ousting a dictatorial regime is a positive development. Yet the playbook for how to navigate the weeks and months after a dictators overthrow is far from clear. One year since the anti-regime protests began, Sudan provides a window into the struggles of a society seeking to excavate itself from decades of dictatorship.

One can dream of a Hollywood script: The people overthrow the dictator, every remnant of his regime disappears, and democracy takes hold overnight. But in the real world there is a prolonged period of navigating a gray zone. For those tasked with leading the transitional period, this means an ever-present trade-off between advancing the reforms required to move Sudan toward democracy and actually behaving in a way that reflects the democratic ideals they hope to bring about. It would be easy for the transitional government, and gratifying for many ordinary Sudanese, to see a mass purge of all those associated with the former regime. But such an approach would just continue the cycle that has dogged Sudan since its independence. As Mohiedeen al-Fadih, a Sudanese teacher and poet, put it to me: The problem with the previous revolutions is that they were not revolutions. They were just changes in the regime.

Originally posted here:
The Enemies of Sudan's Democracy Are Lurking Everywhere - Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting