The threshold is high
I guess that’s one way to go – “Look, the president says stuff like that all the time, so because he says it all the time, it can’t be impeachable.”
Thornberry admits it was inappropriate for Trump to pressure a foreign country for political smears, but not impeachable because Trump does it all the time.
Thornberry’s argument:
There’s not really anything that the President said in that phone call that’s different from what he says in public all the time. So is there some sort of abuse of power that rises to that threshold that is different than the American people have been hearing for three years? I don’t hear that.
It’s not different from what he says in public, therefore it must be non-impeachable.
I don’t exactly follow the chain of reasoning, but no doubt that’s my ignorance.
I believe the idea is supposed to be that the American people elected him knowing full well what an utterly irredeemable person he was, and he’s done absolutely nothing since his election to even try and redeem himself, so impeaching him over this behaviour is tantamount to countermanding the expressed will of the electorate.
Never mind that a) he was elected by a minority of the electorate who were surgically targeted by foreign propaganda and misinformed by domestic obsession with the trivialities of his opponent, and b) a crime doesn’t stop being a crime just because you do it in public.
Sadly, while the American people should have known that Trump was utterly irredeemable, a non-trivial number of voters (almost certainly enough to tip the election) swallowed the nonsense that (1) Trump was so rich that he didn’t need and wouldn’t take donor money, and would be incorruptible; (2) Hillary was the real danger of corruption, what with the possibility that the Clinton Foundation might conceivably be used for corrupt ends (even though there was no evidence of such), and her failure to follow optimal document retention policies.