How Republicans' impeachment defense undermines the Electoral College

Republicans defending Donald Trump from impeachment keep making a curious argument:

Of course, Donald Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, received nearly 66 million votes. That's ... more. But she lost the Electoral College, which places more emphasis on where voters cast their ballots than the number of votes a candidate receives, and Donald Trump won the presidency.

Ever since, Republicans have argued for the rightness of the Electoral College by arguing the founders had antimajoritarian designs on protecting the people's rights, and it's a lousy argument -- one I guarantee they wouldn't be making if they'd lost two elections in 20 years despite winning the popular vote (just as most Democrats would also be on the other side of the issue) -- but fine.

That's what makes the "63 million voters" argument against impeachment so interesting. It relies on a particular kind of democratic legitimacy that Donald Trump hasn't earned. If we're so concerned about overturning the will of 63 million voters, we surely ought to be concerned with overturning the will of 66 million voters -- which is what the Electoral College does. If you take the GOP argument seriously, Trump would have a stronger argument against impeachment if he'd won the popular vote. He didn't and he doesn't.

The next election is sacred, too.

The next election is sacred, too.

In recent weeks, Republicans have defended President Trump against the prospect of impeachment by suggesting that Congress would be undoing the results of the 2016 presidential election by removing its winner from office. If Democrats in Congress were acting in the complete absence of wrongdoing by the president, the GOP argument would be powerful. But there is plenty of evidence of wrongdoing, and the Republican argument is misguided.

It isn’t difficult to understand why. But let’s break down what the president is accused of doing, and why it is impeachable.

The allegation is this:

That President Trump abused his power…

...to pressure Ukraine officials to investigate Joe Biden and his family…

...in order to undermine Biden’s chances of winning the White House in 2020.

Again: President Trump used his official power — the power voters gave him — to put his thumb on the scale for the 2020 election.

The 2016 election was important. It was fought under rules I don’t like or believe to be sufficiently democratic — that’s been the case since before I was born — and, yes, I found the results appalling. But mostly because I fully expected President Trump to abuse his power early and often. Which the evidence suggests is exactly what he has done.

But the 2020 election is important too. And if the will of the people matters as much as Republican say it did in 2016, then the role of the federal government and its officials — including Donald Trump — is not to put their thumb on the scale, but to protect the integrity of that election.

Trump, by trying to get Ukraine to act against Biden, threatened the integrity of that election. He threatened the will of the voters of 2020.

Impeachment, then, is a necessary corrective. Otherwise, I don't know how the American people can trust the election process in the future.

If the next election matters in any democratic sense, then the GOP argument against impeachment makes little sense. If we want the voters to have the final say on who occupies the Oval Office, that must be true in the future as well as the past.