https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/censure-rather-impeachment-wont-end-political-bruce-thornton/
As the House impeachment farce doubles-down on its buffoonery, many voices are calling for an alternative: Don’t impeach, but censure the president. This compromise will end the Dems’ effort to impeach on the basis of second- and third-hand opinion and an Orwellian torture of terms like “bribery,” yet still “send a message” that Trump crossed some line of presidential decorum by asking a foreign head of state to “dig up dirt,” as some pundits call it, on a possible political opponent. Perhaps such a bipartisan gesture will also contribute to ending the stark divisions between the parties, and return us to our bipartisan “democratic norms.”
This “solution,” however, solves nothing, and begs the central question of the whole imbroglio: that the president did something seriously wrong. That claim is not self-evidently true, and should be contested as yet another obsession with Trump’s undiplomatic––i.e. not weaselly––words rather than his actions.
Let’s review the background of the alleged offense. Towards the end of the Obama administration, the issue of Ukraine’s endemic corruption had been raised. Also of concern was Hunter Biden’s cushy job with the corrupt Ukrainian Burisma company, as former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified during the impeachment hearings. Moreover, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik pointed out during her questioning that Yovanovitch was coached by Obama’s people about how Yovanovitch should respond to questions concerning the bad optics of the Bidens’ actions when she testified in her Senate confirmation hearings.
As the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman reported last month, Obama administration officials, then, certainly were concerned about the Bidens, and with good cause. For example, a Washington consulting outfit used Biden’s name while requesting a State Department meeting to improve Bursima’s image, explicitly saying that Burisma put Hunter Biden on its board to leverage such meetings. A State Department official who tried to raise a red flag about the Bidens was ignored by a Biden staffer. An Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy also expressed concerns to Biden himself, with no results.