Not long after the White House released the rough transcript of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Latin phrase ‘quid pro quo’ started to dominate the American lexicon. That phrase is now bandied back and forth by Republicans and Democrats, as if it is the shuttlecock in a game of political badminton. Democrats have erroneously objectified ‘quid pro quo’ as a symbol of the President’s corruption while Republicans have fetishized it in their lust to win. Both ‘teams’ seem to believe that by battering this fraught phrase past their opponent’s verbal rackets they will earn points toward an irreproachable match victory. However, victory is not the proper objective when faced with a possible infringement upon the freedom and fairness of our electoral process. Truth is!

Failure to safeguard our elections, no matter the source of the threat, has the very real potential to set fire to the tinder of hyper-partisanship and social mistrust currently littering the national landscape. When faced with a moment as fraught as this in the middle of the 19th century, a generation of Americans equally, and as ferociously divided, but lacking their own example which we have today, were unable to suppress the resulting spark. That spark ignited a conflagration which consumed the nation, and 500,000 American lives. At least in the case of the Civil War, a moral correction, the end of slavery (though not the sole impetus for our internecine…