Draws Are Unsatisfying

Believe me, I never thought I’d turn out to be using sports analogies in my writing, especially in discussing something as serious as the Presidential impeachment case, but today, it’s boxing.

It’s a sport many of you may not approve of, but I’m not here to debate that, just to talk about how it works. It’s not complicated. In a typical professional match, two men (or women) fight each other in a ring in a series of up to 12 timed rounds. The knockout, in which one of them ends up on the canvas, can’t get up and is counted out by the referee, is, fortunately,  much less common these days. Usually, the winner is instead determined in a point system by a team of three independent judges.

The interesting part is that those three people can see the same fight and come to entirely different conclusions, often not even agreeing on who won. Some judges score on the number of punches a fighter lands, while others consider the damage done to the opponent. Once in a while, the combined scores end in a tie, and the contest is a draw. In that case, nobody goes home happy.

Analogies are always only partly right, but this one is close enough. A majority in each house of the Congress looked at the facts presented in the impeachment case and came to different conclusions.

The House Democratic managers presented their case that the President illegally asked his counterpart in Ukraine to dig up dirt on political rival Joe Biden and his son in return for assistance in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The Republican majority in the Senate did not feel those actions were proven, or even if they were, didn’t merit removal of the President from office, and fought the case largely on procedural grounds.

The President was acquitted by the Senate, a ruling we must accept. To me, though, it still felt like a draw

Back in the boxing world, when there’s a draw in a high-profile fight, the first thing the fans demand is a rematch, which often takes place many months after the first fight, with a lot of hype to bump up the prize money. The rematch is aimed at settling the lingering question: Who is the better fighter?

In the November election, we the fans are also the judges. The rules are much simpler. We get to put aside all the scholarly Constitutional debate and decide for ourselves whether the President’s behavior has been OK, or whether he is OK, and we are not limited to the facts or arguments advanced during the impeachment process.

As a fan, I would accept a decision based strictly on points. But I think I can speak for most of us, in that I would much rather see an electoral knockout to clearly settle the question one way or the other.