Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner wants the U.S. Senate to get on with the country's business and stop the attempt to overturn an election.

Toward putting an end to the impeachment show, the Republican senator announced Wednesday his opposition to parading witnesses through the Senate after the House failed to prove high crimes or misdemeanors by President Donald Trump. Without Gardner's support for witnesses, Democrats likely will fail to protract prosecution for the sake of harming Republicans from blue and purple states.

In taking a stand to defend a fair and legal election from additional attacks, Gardner stood for the Constitution and the public's right to choose presidents.

Citing media rumors about contents of a forthcoming book by John Bolton, people disgruntled about a nearly 4-year-old election insist the Senate subpoena the former national security adviser to testify. If Bolton said what they suspect is in his book, Democrats would prove nothing justifying the removal of Trump.

Reports say Bolton's book recounts Trump saying he did not wish to release military aid to Ukraine until the country came forth with information about potential meddling in the 2016 election. He also wanted information about suspected fraud involving former Vice President Joe Biden.

Assume that is exactly what Bolton would tell the Senate. Presidents discuss options and ideas with advisers all day every day. Then comes the question posed Wednesday by constitutional scholar and Harvard Law School graduate Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas.

"As a matter of law does it matter if there was a quid pro quo? Is it true that quid pro quos are often used in foreign policy?" asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, reading the senator's question.

Liberal Democrat and emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who graduated first in his class at the top-ranked Yale Law School, answered. He posed a hypothetical, in which Congress approved a large aid package for Israel or the Palestinians. In his story, a Democratic president balks. The president withholds Israel's money unless the government stops Israeli settlement growth. Or, the president tells Palestinians they get no money unless they stop funding terror.

Dershowitz rightly concludes few, if any, would question a president's authority to conduct the quid pro quo. Our one-person executive branch with veto power is authorized to challenge the legislative branch.

Dershowitz explained most politicians make decisions in the interest of winning future elections because they view their service as a matter of the public's best interest. He recounted President Abraham Lincoln ordering Gen. William Sherman to send troops into Indiana so they would vote for the Republican Party. Lincoln risked American lives in doing so.

"He believed his own election was essential to victory in the Civil War," Dershowitz said. We can be thankful Democrats did not impeach Lincoln.

Trump might have considered the 2020 election in contemplating and discussing the potential of withholding aid. No harm, no foul, no crime, not even close.

It seems certain he also considered his duty to root out suspicions of foreign interference in the 2016 election and possible fraud committed by the former vice president and his son. Two days before Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, fresh media reports raised alarming suspicions about the Bidens abusing power for personal financial gain. Trump would have been derelict in failing to ask questions when dealing with Ukraine. And that, at most, is what he did.

Trump delivered the aid in advance of the deadline, and his opponents have proved no sinister motive or action. The supposed victim of the allegation, President Zelensky, denies feeling pressure to perform favors in return for the aid. Attorneys for Trump decimated the House impeachment case, rendering it a conspiracy theory.

More than anything else, the effort to overturn an election has alerted the small impeachment audience to serious and unresolved concerns about millions of dollars flowing to Hunter Biden for his service on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. The impeachment highlights how Joe Biden, as vice president — in a quid pro quo deal he bragged about on TV — demanded that Ukrainian officials fire a prosecutor who likely was investigating the Bidens.

Not all quid pro quo demands are equal. Some involve defending the country's best interests. Those are legal. Others involve misusing power with sinister, personal financial motives. Those are crimes.

The unintended consequence of the Senate hearings is a spotlight directly on Joe Biden's suspected abuse of power for his family's pecuniary gain. That might explain why Sen. Bernie Sanders is surging to front-runner status in the Democratic primary. Trump's harshest critics have not implied personal financial motive involving his questions of Ukraine before releasing hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.

Gardner and others in the Senate have carried out their constitutional duties by carefully examining 100-plus hours of testimony by 17 witnesses as presented by House managers. Much of the evidence exonerates Trump. Democrats have no case for overturning the election. Gardner has no business trying to fix it for them. It is time to end the charade.

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE

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