How the Security Democrats came around
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
5:00 A.M.
... The debate over whether to remove the President from office will not begin with arguments over Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election, or President Trump’s detention of children at the border, or his Administration’s pattern of self-dealing and corruption, but over the question of whether the President held up military aid to the Ukrainian government this summer on the condition that its President provide him with damaging information about the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden.
There are many ways to tell the story of how, exactly, this came to be, but one begins at 9 p.m. on Monday, when the Washington Post published an op-ed by seven freshmen Democratic members of Congress, arguing that the Ukraine allegations, if true, “represent an impeachable offense.” The seven Democrats were not especially famous, but they shared several significant characteristics. Each had a lengthy record of military or intelligence service, each had won a seat in Congress in 2018, each had defeated a Republican incumbent, and each represented a moderate district that was seen as vulnerable to being lost to the Republicans in 2020. The op-ed had a pointed earnestness. “Everything we do harks back to our oaths to defend the country,” the seven freshmen wrote. “These new allegations are a threat to all we have sworn to protect” ...
... thirty minutes after the op-ed was published, one of its authors, Elaine Luria, of Virginia, was sitting on Rachel Maddow’s set. Luria is a retired naval commander, and she was wearing her House-member pin as a pendant around her neck. Maddow asked her how she had reached the decision to support impeachment. Luria replied, “Well, my thinking process is, if this particular instance that’s happened, with the President of the United States enlisting a foreign leader to assist him in conducting an investigation that will smear and damage his potential political opponent in the upcoming election, and in the process of doing that potentially withhold foreign aid to that country—if this isn’t impeachable, what is?” She used the word “concise” to describe the case against the President, and she seemed to be making an effort to be concise herself, picking her words carefully.
Luria represents a particular strain of the midterm triumph of 2018—she was a political novice and a national-security lifer who was said to have run not out of ideological conviction but out of a patriotic concern for the fate of the country under Trump. Luria’s co-authors have similar backgrounds ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/how-the-security-democrats-flipped-on-impeachment