It Wasn't Just About Lying

I'm hearing this from my Republican friends: "So don't Adam Schiff's lies matter?" and "If we impeached all presidents for lying...."

Sigh.

My Republican friends need to recall that there were two articles of impeachment:

1) Abuse of Power

2) Obstruction of Congress.

It wasn't just about "lying," though that is how Republicans are spinning it.

One of the great losses of the Reformation is the idea that while all have indeed sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, some sins are venial, and others are mortal. As Alan Jacobs, an evangelical who has taught at Wheaton and now is at Baylor, writes in his blog post, "Oh, for the Normally Bad, "

<...our criticism of Trump is not that he has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, it’s that he is a person of exceptionally terrible character: He is a petty, vindictive, mercurial, willfully and grossly ignorant, self-serving, congenitally dishonest, paranoid narcissist. We just want a President who, to borrow a phrase from P. J. O’Rourke, is bad within normal parameters.>

https://blog.ayjay.org/oh-for-the-normally-bad/

ISTM we fail to do justice when we fail to discern degrees of sin. And because the Senate has put fear before discernment, they have succeeded in pushing the Overton window, so that now the idea of separation of powers is at best a quaint memory.

Finally, so far as I can tell, while Adam Schiff is certainly not without sin, he has not yet abused power or obstructed Congress.