This piece is appearing in three newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06). Many of the ideas contained here appeared also in the piece “Time Soon to Shiftthe Spotlight from Trump’s Evil to that of His Republican Accomplices.” This iteration is more fully crafted, and also contains ideas not present in the earlier statement— ideas that illuminate how the Democrats are challenged to overcome their previous ineffectiveness in confronting a Republican Party over their disgraceful behavior.
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In the impeachment process in the Senate, two battles now loom. In these two battles, it is almost certain that the Republicans will show – more fully than at any previous juncture -- what their party has become. And the Democrats, correspondingly, will show whether they can at last succeed in passing a test that they’ve failed consistently for the past generation.
The first of these two battles will be over whether the Senate trial will include witnesses and documents -- highly relevant to whether Donald Trump is guilty of the charges outlined in the Articles of Impeachment – as they have been and would be in virtually every other American trial.
Yet everyone expects that all – or almost all – of the Republicans in the Senate will vote not to include such basic evidence. That means that the Senate Republicans would be choosing to be the accomplices of Trump’s long-running cover-up.
They would be abetting Trump in perpetrating the lie that he “did nothing wrong” – obviously a lies in the light of Trump’s all-out effort to prevent the American people from getting a full picture of what their President has done with the great powers with which they have entrusted him.
Although blocking a real trial would be but the most recent of a series of unprecedented actions that the Republicans have taken over the past generation that have undermined the integrity of America’s constitutional order, none of those that went before this impeachment process have so seriously threatened the very foundation of the Constitution.
Which brings us to the second battle: over whether to “remove this President” from office or to “leave the powers of the presidency in his hands.”
The Articles of Impeachment focus on Trump’s conduct with respect to Ukraine, in which it has been proved that he illegally sought to cheat in his re-election campaign, and did so in a way that undermined American national security for his own personal political advantage, and has unconstitutionally defied the explicit powers of Congress to act as a oversee the President, especially in an impeachment process.
Even if those were the only ways this President had violated the constitutional word, they would be quite sufficient to require Senators – if they honor their oath – to vote to remove him. But as all the Senators know, these offenses are but a part of a larger picture of this President’s quite publicly assaulting the Constitution. E.g. his
usurping power to impose his tariffs (Tariffs are under Congress’s authority); usurping power to build his wall (it is up to Congress to decide what money will be spent for); his committing “multiple felonies,” described in depth in the Mueller Report, of obstruction of justice described in depth in the Mueller Report; violating both the domestic and the foreign emoluments clauses of the Constitution.If the Senate were to acquit such a President – one whose contempt for the Constitution is entirely unprecedented in American history – such an acquittal would strike a fundamental blow to the essential spirit of American democracy. For declaring the most powerful man in the nation “above the law” is, essentially, to endorse the replacement of “the rule of law” with dictatorship.
Yet every observer assumes that all – or almost all – of the Republicans will be voting to do just that.
While there’s not much question about what the Republicans will do, the pressing question of this moment whether the Democrats will be able to make the Republicans pay the appropriate steep political price for behaving in so disgraceful and dishonorable a way.
The Republican Party could never have become so morally bankrupt as it is now had it not found that it could not only avoid punishment, but be rewarded with power for its bad behavior. And -- in a two-party nation where power comes from popular support – such behavior could only be rewarded if the other party had been ineffective in exposing the evils of its rival.
The Republicans benefitted mightily from (among many other unprecedented – and destructive -- acts):
the unprecedented way they used 9/11 for partisan advantage, deliberately sacrificing national unity; their unprecedented endorsement of torture from the highest level; their unprecedented refusal to allow Obama to exercise his constitutional right to name a Supreme Court Justice.The Republican Party benefitted from its unprecedented refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of any duly-elected President from the opposing party: 1) spending years searching for something for which to impeach Clinton; 2) making Obama’s failure its top priority (disrespecting the people’s choice on whom to hire for the nation’s central leadership role); 3) openly preparing to undo Hillary’s presidency had she won.
All disgraceful, but the Democrats failed to disgrace the Republican Party for its ongoing corrosion of the norms of the American system.
Now -- with the most fundamental aspects of the American constitutional order at stake in the impeachment trial of this most impeachable President –– we reach a culmination of this generation-long battle.
A moment of truth: will the Democrats, having proved Trump’s evils, now successfully expose those of his Republican accomplices? Will the American people see that Party for the morally bankrupt force it has become?
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Some offerings:
Having spent the previous forty years investigating the forces that have shaped the human world over the millennia, I felt compelled in 2004 to turn my full-time attention to understanding and calling out the destructive force that has taken over the political right in America over the past generation. Here are a few articles, written in the past several years, that expressed something important to me about how our situation is to be understood and about the experience of living in times of such darkness and danger as the downward slide of American democracy and the rising power of a political force that consistently works to make our world more broken.
“Cry the Benighted Country” – on the way the balance of power between the forces of “good” and “evil” (or life-serving vs. life-degrading, or constructive vs. destructive, or wholeness vs. brokenness) can shift in a society, and how over the past generation we have witnessed an adverse shift in America.
“When Evil Rises Among a People” – on the painful and frightening experience of watching people who had seemed good and decent get transformed into something that serves “Evil.” (It starts with a stunning scene from Cabaret.)
(And one piece to which I’m quite attached, representing a much-needed break from dealing with all the darkness of these times, is “The Sacred Space of Lovers.”)
A compendium of op/eds that I’ve written weekly to challenge the conservatives, among whom I live, can be found here. And a compendium of op/eds I’ve written to challenge Liberal America to see this battle for what it is -- and to fight it as it needs to be fought -- can be found here.
In 2019, in an effort to convey the Big Picture of the dynamics driving the story of our species (generally, and that also illuminates specifically the meaning of the current American “Trump Crisis”), I published a series of three op/eds under the banner “WHAT SHAPES OUR WORLD.” The three pieces – each dedicated to one big idea – were:
Evolution: A Most Elegant and Illuminating IdeaHow the Rise of Civilization Brought the Reign of PowerGood Battling Evil