12/15/19
The headline the New York Times editorial board settled on was simple: “Impeach.”
The same could be said of the “damning” case laid out against President Trump, the Times said Saturday, as it joined a growing roster of more than a dozen national and regional newspapers that argue that the Senate should take up convincing accusations of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Many papers backing impeachment have described a slow-building choice amid hearings into whether Trump abused his position to pressure a foreign power for personal political gain. “With reluctance …” the piece by the Tampa Bay Times begins. “Until recently,” USA Today writes, “we believed that impeachment proceedings would be unhealthier for an already polarized nation than simply leaving Trump’s fate up to voters next November.” The Los Angeles Times mulled a call for impeachment for months, said Nicholas Goldberg, the paper’s editorial page editor. Staffers worried the proceedings would just inflame American divisions and probably not result in Trump’s departure, no matter the findings. He and his colleagues had listened to a slew of career officials describe their discomfort. They had heard about messages and phone calls documenting mounting pressure on Ukraine. They had noted the concerns of constitutional scholars. “We’ve seen enough,” they wrote. The Post’s editorial board notes that Trump’s refusal to cooperate in any way with Congress’s inquiry sets him apart from past presidents. Trump has blocked the release of documents as well as testimony by a dozen current and former senior officials, and newspapers argue that those missing voices could clarify Trump’s intent in withholding military aid.
As for the concerns that made them “late converts”: Those “must yield to the overwhelming evidence that Trump perverted U.S. foreign policy for his own political gain,” the editorial board said. “That sort of misconduct is outrageous and corrosive of democracy.” Editorial boards, too — groups of opinion writers who operate independently from the newsroom — have split on whether Trump should become the third U.S. president to be impeached. The Wall Street Journal criticized the Democrats’ case as “weak” on Wednesday, arguing that “abuse of power” as the president’s critics have outlined it is too vague. But the editorial pages of other national outlets — the New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today — have put their weight behind impeachment, along with major local papers around the country. The list includes the Los Angeles Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the Tampa Bay Times, the Orlando Sentinel, the Boston Globe, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle. “There may be no single, smoking gun, but there’s ample acrid black stuff rising from the White House,” the New York Daily News wrote.
