A key element of President Donald Trump's defense in his impeachment was the argument that if what he did wasn't a violation of a specific criminal statute, it wasn't impeachable. Most serious legal experts say that argument is ridiculous — but it's also ridiculous that inviting interference into an American election is not currently, specifically illegal.

Perhaps it took a president willing to sink this low to highlight this major hole in the federal statutes. Congress should fill that hole and pass a specific law against this most un-American of offenses.

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails," Trump said in July 2016, in reference to the overblown issue of deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's private account. On that very day, Russia attempted to hack into Clinton's servers. As special counsel Robert Mueller would later establish, Vladimir Putin's government was bent on helping Trump win, or at least undermining public faith in the whole U.S. election process.

Those goals were also behind a Kremlin-connected lawyer's offer to provide Trump's campaign with dirt on Clinton. The campaign took the meeting, in Trump Tower, no less. As has been pointed out before, the fact that the meeting didn't yield said dirt makes the campaign no more innocent than the bank robber who breaks into a vault only to discover it's empty.

Then there was Ukraine. The White House's own summary of Trump's "perfect" phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — "We need you to do us a favor, though." — established that, yes, Trump tried to leverage military aid to a besieged ally in exchange for personal political gain. Trump released the money only after the scheme was revealed, though he continued calling on Ukraine and others to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans who looked at all this and concluded it wasn't impeachable will be judged by history, but the failure of federal law in this case is a judgment that's easy to make right now. Current law prohibits campaigns from accepting money or any other "thing of value" from a foreign national. Does a sitting president pressing a foreign government to create a political scandal against an opponent fall under that law? It's debatable — but it should be a specifically outlawed act in any case. Does any American seriously believe otherwise?

Apparently so. House Democrats have passed measures to do just that, but they have been shelved without so much as a hearing in the Senate. Those House Democrats should pass them again — and again — and dare the Republican-dominated Senate to keep slapping them down right up until Election Day. If even the simple proposition that American elections should be decided by Americans is now too problematic for Trump's Senate Republican captives to support, that should become an election issue in itself.

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