Editorial: Impeachment and questions of truth

For the fourth time in the history of the republic, articles of impeachment have been introduced against the president of the United States.

In many respects, today's impeachment echoes the 1998-99 effort led by suburban Congressional icon Henry Hyde against Bill Clinton.

The House voted then too on the eve of Christmas, and the Senate then took up the matter after Congress reconvened in the new year.

Then as now, positions on impeachment were divided sharply based on party affiliation.

"The country is already badly divided over this issue," we wrote then, "and fed up with the excessive partisanship displayed by both sides in the (House) committee (along with) the specter of a long and uneasy Senate trial, the near certainty that it would not end in conviction, (and) the overwhelming public preference to resolve this matter ..."

Ultimately, the impeachment debate in the Clinton case centered on a lie. The president denied, both with ugly flamboyance to reporters and later under oath, having engaged in sex with a White House intern. The evidence would not only prove that was a lie but that it was a blatant one.

Eerily, the case against Donald Trump ultimately comes down to the same question: Truthfulness.

There is no disputing that while the U.S. was holding back a weapons package Ukraine had sought, Donald Trump asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate chief rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Ukraine energy company Burisma.

"There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution," Trump told Zelenskiy, "and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."

The question is how truthful has Trump been about his motivation.

How believable is it that the delay in the weapons package was unrelated to the Biden investigation?

That hold was released shortly after the whistleblower filed a concern about the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call. Is it believable to think that timing was coincidental?

Is it believable to think that Trump was concerned about corruption in general in Ukraine when he hasn't complained about it in other countries such as, say, Saudi Arabia? And when in his phone call with Zelenskiy, Trump raised concerns only about the Bidens and about challenging the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 race?

Finally, is it believable to think Trump would block virtually all White House testimony if he didn't have something to hide?

And there are believability issues regarding his accusers, as well. How credible is it, for instance, that Democrats' motives stem solely from devotion to constitutional duty, as they piously insist? How do they account for the years of impeachment talk, starting even before the Mueller investigation, that have led critics to accuse them of having tried to manufacture a case for impeachment from the beginning of Trump's tenure.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to questions like all these. Given the hardened positions and the country's polarized exhaustion, it's hard to say how many of us are genuinely listening for answers.