Texas echo - Senate has an opportunity to hear from witnesses in the Donald Trump impeachment trial

The Dallas Morning News echo editorial published on January 28, 2020:

If there is to be closure on impeachment, the Senate needs to call witnesses:  American people need to have all knowable facts before the trial concludes.

"...facts need to be testified to under oath..."

In a perfect world, the impeachment of a president of the United States would be a solemn event where all the parties involved would be keen on discovering and revealing to the general public all knowable and relevant information about the issues at hand. In a perfect world, the spade work on such information would have been done long before votes were being cast in the Senate and with time enough for the voting public to judge the validity the serious issue of removing a president, fairly elected, from office.

But to say that we do not live in a perfect world is to far understate the politics unfolding in the U.S. Senate this week. Reasonable people can argue about whether the House followed the right process and whether the president should be able to call the witnesses he wants. But the truth is that there will be no real justice, and no closure for the American people, without additional documents and witnesses.

The truth, however, is also much larger than process. 

Donald J. Trump is now the third president in American history to face an impeachment trial in the Senate. And all indications are that this trial will end with the same result as the first two: with the impeached president surviving in office after all the votes in the Senate are counted, after all the shouting was done and after the overwrought invocation of history was over.

There is, however a key difference and an important principle still at stake in this impeachment fight. Everyone should understand that it is unlikely there will be 67 votes in the Senate in favor of removing the president. But reasonable people should also want as many facts on the record, spoken under oath, as possible. What’s at stake here is whether voters, regardless of their political desires, will be able to ascertain a full appreciation of all facts before they step inside the voting booth this fall.

Our own view is the removal of a president should be reserved for the violation of an identifiable law so as to guard against an abuse of the impeachment power in the hands of Congress. But, beyond how individual senators vote on the final outcome, our view is also that facts need to be testified to under oath, where the veracity of each assertion can be tested and attested to by others. Doing so allows reasonable minds to put into context all knowable information and make informed judgments over what happened, over whether punishment is warranted and whether a president should retain office.

There is a phrase in the preamble to our great Constitution that we think should more often be on the minds of our lawmakers. It says the document was drafted “to form a more perfect Union.” While we do not live in a perfect world, revealing all the facts there are to know about an episode that led a man to become only the third U.S. president to be impeached is a step that drives closer to such an ideal. The Senate has an opportunity to do that, it needs only to vote to hear from witnesses.