To the Editor:

The President of the United States (no longer to be confused, or considered synonymous with, “Leader of the Free World”) confessed on an almost daily basis to having used foreign aid as a lure to coerce the head of a foreign government (an ally under attack by a common foe) to make a public announcement that it’s investigating his political opponent in the upcoming election. He’s even bragged about being untouchable because he’s sitting on the evidence while refusing to cooperate or allow certain officials to testify.

Trump was successfully impeached because Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives did their job. But his trial in the Senate stalled when the Majority Leader — who had already demonstrated his contempt for procedure by arbitrarily strong-arming the previous President out of a Supreme Court nomination — took a similarly bold approach to trivial details, such as hearing testimony from witnesses.

That Senate Republicans would buy into Alan Dershowitz’ cockamamie, inane rhetorical hogwash was extreme even for them. Dershowitz, in defending the President, asserted that since “every public official ... believes that his election is in the public interest,” therefore, “if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected is in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid promo that results in impeachment.” And to think, Harvard University actually pays this looney-toon to teach law.

So, what are we left with? We seem to be cursed with an assemblage of elected officials to whom the Constitution of the United States means nothing, to whom taking an oath (in God’s name) means nothing, to whom representative government, checks and balances, democracy, and the rule of law, mean nothing. The United States Senate, by acquitting Donald Trump, has chosen to reject evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the president whose abuse of power the Founders specifically created the Senate to counteract.

Americans have no choice but to conclude that self-centered fear of intervention by Trump into their reelection campaigns has made Republican senators not just supporters of this incorrigible, unmanageable and unchangeable president, but eager accomplices in his aggressive and egregious misuse of executive privilege and (perhaps unwittingly) decisively weakening their own power.

It’s almost as if these senators thought themselves unworthy (with the exception of Mitt Romney (Republican of Utah) of removing this unfit president from office despite their constitutional and moral responsibility to do so if the evidence warranted it and (despite new evidence having been barred from the trial by Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republican senators) from what we knew already, this president clearly met the criteria justifying impeachment and removal from office.

No one described the Senate trial better than Ross K. Baker, distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University, when he said: “What we are witnessing is a Senate in the act of institutional suicide.”

It has been stated and written in one way or another by so many writers ...  the Founders tried to lay what they perceived would be a permanent foundation for a new nation striving toward its ideals and future greatness. They clearly anticipated and feared someone like Donald Trump, and tried their level best to give us the remedies and protections we’d need to shield and preserve our people and our nation. Unfortunately, because senators chose to violate their oaths and to disregard the Constitution, the safeguards were unable to protect us from the president’s wrongful acts. Let us hope the Republic the framers envisioned doesn’t fail as well.

David L. Snell

Franklin