The Democrats should understand that this impeachment battle is part of a larger war. They are up against not only this Trump presidency, they are also up against this Trump Party. The Party whose rot enabled Trump to become President. And whose rot is about to be on full display — as they make choices history will mark as shameful betrayals of the nation — as this impeachment process moves ahead.
In this impeachment process, two battles lie ahead.
“fair trial” vs. “cover-up,” to be followed by remove a dangerous, criminal, and corrupt President” or “keep the power of the presidency in such manifestly untrustworthy and dangerous hands.”It is almost certain that all or almost all the Republican senators will make the choice to support the darker, more broken side in each of those two battles. Thus these battles represent opportunities for the Democrats to expose how morally bankrupt this Republican Party has become.
That means that, soon, the Democrats’ task will be to take the battle to their Republican colleagues. Virtually certainly, the Republicans’ conduct — so irresponsible at a moment so vital to the nation’s integrity, a moment so dangerous, as the House Managers have shown — will call for the Democrats to set aside their habitual cajoling of their Republican “friends,” and to make a fight of it.
Time to stop trying to persuade the Republicans to do the right thing; time instead to expose what it says about the Republicans if they do the wrong thing.
For a generation, the Democrats have failed to make the Republicans pay a proper political price for disgraceful behavior. The impeachment process will give the Democrats two major opportunities to succeed at that task.
That’s what the nation needs now to come out of what the Republican-dominated Senate is about to do with the impeachment of this lawless and dangerous President.
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The first battle will be over bringing in the most relevant witnesses and documentary evidence into this constitutionally-mandated trial, as any other trial in America would do.
The Republicans will vote to be Trump’s accomplices in his unconstitutional cover-up.
As for what Trump and his accomplices have done all they could to cover up, the Democrats have nonetheless completed a masterful job of presenting an overwhelming picture of Trump’s “evil.” (Like many others, I want especially to pay tribute to the heroic job done by Adam Schiff.) They didn’t use that word --”evil”— but one nonetheless understood:
how dark it is to sacrifice the security of the nation in order to cheat to get more power; how dark it is to try to compel a President of a nation elected on a platform of cleaning up corruption to be an accomplice in a corrupt transaction; how dark it is for a President of the United States to seize for himself the powers of a dictator, – a ruler to whom everyone is accountable, and who insists on being accountable to no one.Laying out so masterful a picture of Trump’s evil lays the predicate for exposing the evil of a political party that works to protect him, in violation of their oath of office. A party, that is, that votes to prevent the American people from getting as full a picture of their President’s conduct
as the people want (72%), as the people deserve, since it is the people who hire the president and bestow on him the powers of that office; and as the people need, as this impeachment represents a major constitutional crisis in which the voice of the people should be informed by as complete knowledge as possible of what’s happening with their government, and how the verdict in the Senate will impact the nature of their government.It is a betrayal of the people when these Republican Senators vote for a travesty of a “trial” in order to hide from the people what they need to know.
(I have argued in an earlier piece today that the better scenario for the Democrats in the larger battle might be to fight-and-lose the battle over witnesses, rather than to fight-and-win. The clarity of the picture of Republican moral bankruptcy is greater if the Republicans succeed in their cover-up.)
2) And then, when the question of a verdict comes up, the Democrats can expose the Republicans all over again.
They can show what it says about a Party that — for its own political purposes — refuses to remove this most impeachable of presidents from office, but instead votes to keep presidential power in the hands of someone so untrustworthy, someone who has so fundamentally violated the public trust and so clearly is not looking out for the nation’s good (but only his own advantage to satisfy his unending desire for more power and wealth).
Given what’s been proved, there can be little doubt that it is necessary to remove Trump from the presidency (even if what’s described in the Articles of Impeachment were the only instance of Trump being lawless and contemptuous of the Constitution, even if we couldn’t flesh out his lawlessness with many chapters, of which this Ukraine scandal is but one).
A vote to acquit means putting the most powerful man in the nation above the reach of the law. That one act — putting power out of the reach of any checks, i.e. creating a dictatorship --strikes a fundamental blow to the essential spirit of American democracy.
(That spirit of American democracy is composed of such ideals as that “no one is above the law”; oaths are to be honored; government is by and for the people; truth should defeat lies. The Republican conduct here violates all those fundamental American values.)
The Republicans are willing to advance brokenness in all those ways suggests that staying in power is all that now matters in that Party, almost without exception. Moral courage comes up in this trial because it has been in so astoundingly short supply in today’s Republican Party. (It is hard to imagine any American political party of past generations, had it been in the same position, would have produced so vanishingly few “profiles in courage.”)
A vote to acquit Trump shows a lack of concern for protecting American democracy from devolving into another, darker kind of society— the kind of society that America has always opposed. (And the word to use is dictatorship, not monarchy.]’
We’re not primed to fear kings in this era, but from dictators in the past century, Americans have witnessed great evils around the world.)
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In both those battles the Democrats can plan on the Republicans placing themselves firmly on the wrong side— on the side of helping power avoid public scrutiny, and the side of helping power place itself above the law.
Seize the opportunity. Expose it for what it is.
We Americans have had to fight to protect American democracy before, it’s just not had to be a fight between the two major American political parties. That is what is has come to.
The Democrats should recognize that the — even more than previous disgraceful Republican behavior -- this Republican siding with the criminality and corruption and betrayal of the nation of Donald Trump in this impeachment has to mean “This is war.”
Take the gloves off however much is useful for winning that war.