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The competition among Donald Trump's would-be running mates is moving in an unhealthy direction. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, for example, recently echoed the former president’s rhetoric about Jan. 6 convicts, calling them “hostages.”
Soon after, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance upped the ante, suggesting presidents should be willing to disregard Supreme Court rulings they deem “illegitimate” and explaining how he would’ve rejected election results on Jan. 6 if he’d been vice president at the time.
Four days later, Stefanik appeared on CNN and also denounced then-Vice President Mike Pence for having followed the law.
It was apparently Vance’s turn to take an even more outlandish position, and the Ohio Republican did exactly that this week. Politico reported:
Another Donald Trump impeachment over Ukraine funding? Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance says it’s a possibility, if the $95 billion emergency foreign aid spending bill becomes law and Trump wins the election. Vance distributed a memo to Senate GOP offices on Monday arguing that the foreign aid measure could tie Trump’s hands if he comes into office next year wanting to pause Ukraine funds as part of negotiations on ending Russia’s war on the U.S. ally.
The GOP senator went so far as to characterize the security aid supplemental as an “impeachment time bomb for the next Trump presidency.”
Here’s Vance’s pitch in a nutshell: Trump might win the 2024 election, and once in office, he might want to cut off U.S. support for Ukraine. But the bipartisan bill, which passed the Senate this morning, provides support for Ukraine through the end of the next fiscal year — which ends in September 2025, and which the Ohioan sees as the likely first year of Trump’s second term.
And so, the argument goes, if Trump follows through on his intentions and cuts off Ukrainian aid during a time when the United States is supposed to be funding our Ukrainian allies, then House Democrats — who I suppose will be in the majority under Vance’s scenario? — will try to impeach the then-president, just as they did when Trump tried to extort Ukraine in 2019.
Ergo, an “impeachment time bomb.”
I rather doubt that Vance actually believes his own rhetoric, but he’s peddling the convoluted idea anyway in part because he’s been a critic of U.S. support for Kyiv, and in part because he’s desperate to present himself as a Trump champion on Capitol Hill.
But to the extent that reality has any role to play in the debate, the former president wasn’t impeached because he paused support for Ukraine; he was impeached because he sought to use the support as leverage in the hopes that Ukraine would help him cheat in the 2020 election.
It’s this detail that Vance conveniently overlooked as part of his pitch.
It also sets the stage for Stefanik and other potential GOP vice presidential contenders to say something even more ridiculous, in the hopes that Trump will be pleased.
The race to the bottom, in other words, is almost certain to get worse in the coming months, as Republican contenders look for new ways to prove they’re even more ridiculous than their intraparty rivals.