The Constitution does not agree with you here. It says "high crimes and misdemeanors", period.
Article II, Section 4:
"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
High crimes and misdemeanors is a term of art in the 18th century which has lost meaning today. It meant actions not becoming your office. It basically gives Congress leeway to impeach the president for any behavior that departs from the norm.
Under US law the legal definition of bribery includes soliciting getting something of value for an official act:
Bribery
We have gone over this here several times, but you seem to miss the distinction. I will try to be succinct.
When Joe Biden led the delegation to the Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian government to remove prosecutor Viktor Shokin, it was because Shokin was NOT investigating corruption in the Ukraine, including the gas company Hunter Biden was working for Burisma Holdings. Since his removal, Burisma and its president has been investigated for failure to pay taxes and questionable practices getting contracts. All of the instances of contract irregularities happened before Hunter Biden was involved with the company. Hunter Biden had no connection to any of the tax irregularities. There are many stories from many sources laying out the facts including this story:
What really happened when Biden forced out Ukraine's top prosecutor
As has been mentioned above, what Joe Biden did was done completely in the open and many Republican law makers applauded it at the time, as did American allies.
What Trump did was withhold aid authorized by Congress and asked the Ukraine to do a
personal favor to him in exchange for carrying out the duty he was obligated to do by law. There is ample evidence that the hoops the Trump administration jumped through to hold up the aid were so extreme two civil servants who would normally be handling this sort of thing resigned over it citing they were being asked to break the law. There are witnesses to the July 25th phone call who have testified that they were very concerned about Trump's behavior on the phone call.
In short Trump asked the Ukraine to do him a favor that would benefit him personally (announce they were going to investigate his political opponent) in exchange for his legal duty to deliver aid authorized by Congress. His administration went to extremes to hold up that aid illegally.
In the theory of an absolute monarch, the monarch and the state are the same thing. What the monarch wants is what the state wants and there is no distinction. This was common in the 18th century, but the US Constitution was specifically constructed to separate the individual serving as head of state from the country itself. The head of state under US law is obligated to serve the needs of the whole. There is a lot of leeway in this and most presidents have skated the line, but at the end of the day no president has tried to be an absolute monarch anything close to what Trump has tried.
There is no evidence that the Obama administration, or any other, has tied foreign aid to
personal gain anything like Donald Trump did. There are many times foreign policy has been done in such ways to try and help the party in power. IMO, this is not good, but it's in the gray zone legally. By asking a foreign power to do something to help him directly in an election, he both solicited a bribe and asked a foreign power to interfere in a US election, which is another crime.
The laws on what constitutes domestic meddling in US elections have loopholes exploited by many, but the foreign interference part of US election law is pretty clear.
Your arguments about this boil down to conservative media what aboutism that completely contradicts or warps both the facts and the law.
Previous presidents have committed impeachable offenses and got away with it. But we are dealing with the crimes of the current president and the case laid out thus far is very clear if you understand the law at all. The few legal experts who disagree with Trump's guilt have excessively weak arguments for their position.
There is a saying among lawyers that
If you have the law on your side pound the law
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts
If you have neither, pound the table
The Republican/conservative media talking points amount to a lot of table pounding. The rest of the legal world has been touting both facts and laws. The job of conservative media is to sow some doubt and provide some wiggle room for the Republicans, but every time they try a new tactic, facts prove them fools.
