Crapo must not have read that book closely enough

Senators chose all kinds of ways to get through the recent impeachment trial. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, made history by falling asleep, but Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, took a more academic route.

He read a book.

No one will ever know the motive behind his decision to be seen on the floor of the Senate reading a book. Maybe he figured it would be picked up by the media and he would look like the scholarly senator intent on studying the history of impeachment and getting his vote right.

Unfortunately, Sen. Crapo didn’t apply much of what he learned from his studies. His vote against finding President Trump guilty runs contrary to what he read in the book. The book Sen. Crapo was reading, as reported in the Idaho Statesman, was “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump” by constitutional scholar Frank Bowman III.

Since its publication last year, the book has been heralded as a text that could serve as a guide through the impeachment process. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, takes the reader through the politics, law and history of impeachment going as far back as its roots in medieval England.

What’s instructive about this book is Bowman’s review of the intentions of the Founding Fathers regarding impeachment. He concludes that the framers did not intend for “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be limited to indictable crimes. Assuming that Sen. Crapo read Bowman’s text, his excuse for voting “not guilty” just doesn’t square with what he read. Crapo’s statement on his “not guilty” vote reads as follows:

“…the Founders were clear that there must be high hurdles for impeachment…The case of the House managers does not even purport to allege a crime in either Count I or Count II. Moreover, the allegations fall far short of the high threshold for removal of a U.S. president from office, and undermine Americans’ constitutional right to elect their president at the ballot box.”

But that is not what Crapo read in Professor Bowman’s book. Instead, Bowman makes it very clear that “all serious modern scholars and commentators are unanimous that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ need not be crimes.”

What then did the framers intend to be impeachable by “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Bowman, pulling from impeachment history in the British parliament and American impeachment practice, then lists what the framers intended to be classes of conduct that are impeachable. They include: “some kinds of ordinary personal crime, official corruption, severe instances of incompetence, neglect of duty, or maladministration in office; abuse of power; betrayal of the nation’s foreign policy; and subversion of the constitution and the laws.” Scholars can debate whether, according to Sen. Crapo’s “hurdle” rule, these categories are high, low or medium, but they seem to describe much of Trump’s actions on the Ukraine issue.

Bowman leaves no doubt by confirming that “Trump’s offenses against constitutional impropriety and reasonable expectations of presidential behavior is dishearteningly diverse and includes conduct in virtually all the categories of conduct historically identified as ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

How did Sen. Crapo miss this analysis as he was reading Bowman’s book? Even if he had not finished the book, he could have caught a summary of Bowman’s thoughts on the matter in a New York Times op-ed piece when he called the reasoning of Trump’s legal team “constitutional nonsense.”

There can be only one reason a U.S. senator with a Harvard law degree could show off a book making it clear that Trump’s offenses were impeachable and then come up with a false narrative as to why he voted not to find Trump guilty.

Crapo, as opposed to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, placed his own ambition ahead of his allegiance to the United States Constitution. And he did so while showing off his reading of a book that makes it abundantly clear that the history of impeachment and the intent of the Founding Fathers can only lead to Donald Trump having committed impeachable offenses.

Crapo will be up for re-election in 2022, and he must have calculated his chances of a primary challenge if he voted Trump guilty. Or perhaps he has decided not to run, and the rumors are true that he intends to follow the route of many former senators and join the ranks of lobbyists who sell their influence to the highest bidder in Washington. As the chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Crapo knows he’s in the catbird seat to secure an office after his Senate term in a law firm that serves the financial interests of Wall Street. It’s doubtful he could snag a job like that with an impeachment vote against the Republican president.

He would have been smarter to conceal Bowman’s convincing book for impeaching Trump as he read on the Senate floor rather than cast a vote contradicting what he had just read. Or he could have chosen another book. How about “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America”?