Why Impeachment is Necessary

One of the books I am reading - I usually read two to three books in rotation at a time- is titled "Mortal Republic" and looks at the slide of the Roman Republic to an authoritarian, dictatorial rule under emperors.   Some of the parallels between the Roman Republic's slide to tyranny and what we see happening in America in the age of Trump are chilling. Mitch McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans bear a disturbing similarity to Roman senators who valued their own office and remaining in power over their country and the public that they were supposed to represent and serve. At several points the Roman senators of old could have stopped the destruction of the Republic had they exhibited courage and pushed aside craven short term self-interest. Now, Senate Republicans are on the cusp of finding themselves at a similar crossroads where they can either side with upholding the American Republic or they can act as their Roman predecessors did and thereby accelerate the demise of democracy and the U.S. Constitution. Those who think I over dramatize where America finds itself either do not know history and/or are motivated by tribalism, hate and greed. A column in the New York Times looks at why impeaching Trump is imperative.  Here are highlights:

“I think the American people are going to have a chance to decide this at the ballot box in November 2020,” Beto O’Rourke said in March, neatly expressing prevailing Democratic opinion on the question of impeaching President Trump, “and perhaps that’s the best way for us to resolve these outstanding questions.”

This is no longer a tenable position. [Trump's] The president’s bungled bid to coerce Ukraine’s leader into helping the Trump 2020 re-election campaign smear a rival struck “decide it at the ballot box” off the menu of reasonable opinion forever. Mr. Trump’s brazen attempt to cheat his way into a second term stands so scandalously exposed that there can be no assurance of a fair election if he’s allowed to stay in office. Resolving the question of [Trump's] the president’s fitness at the ballot box isn’t really an option, much less the best option, when the question boils down to whether the ballot box will be stuffed.

Impeachment is therefore imperative, not only to protect the integrity of next year’s elections but to secure America’s continued democratic existence. If the House does its job, it will fall to Senate Republicans to reveal, in their decision to convict (or not), their preferred flavor of republic: constitutional or banana.

Mike Murphy, a Republican election consultant, recently remarked that “one Republican senator told me if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump.” Everyone understands that Mr. Trump is wildly popular with conservative voters, and that Senate Republicans would rather not invite primary challengers by alienating them. But when the legitimacy and preservation of our democracy are at stake, striving to keep a Senate seat safe through craven betrayal of the American people could come at a catastrophic price to the country.

It is now impossible to deny that Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden while holding up congressionally appropriated military assistance intended to help Ukraine stave off Russian aggression. Mr. Trump loudly admitted it, and the summary of his July phone conversation with Mr. Zelensky and the whistle-blower report cast it in the worst possible light. If Mr. Trump’s willing to cop to this, all while promoting an Infowars-level conspiracy theory to justify it, the American public can reasonably suspect that he’s abusing the powers of his office in other ways to fix the election in his favor.

[Trump] knows he’s beyond the reach of criminal prosecution only so long as he commands the awesome powers of the executive branch.

The content of the “favors” Mr. Trump asked of the Ukrainian president underscore his feral resolve to barricade himself inside the Oval Office for at least five more years. His purpose in pressuring Mr. Zelensky to inquire into the Ukrainian whereabouts of an imaginary server and to beat the bushes for evidence of corruption involving Mr. Biden’s family was to drum up “evidence” that Russian election interference and his role in abetting it was nothing but a frame job fabricated by Ukrainians, in cahoots with the Democratic Party, to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.

This is the lunacy behind Mr. Trump’s willingness to casually endanger Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia. Worse, by ordering the attorney general, the secretary of state and his personal fixer to lend counterfeit substance to this ridiculous effort, he has untethered American diplomacy and law enforcement from reality.

If the House goes through with impeachment but the Senate acquits, Mr. Trump’s lawlessness will have been lavishly rewarded. He will take it as a signal that absolutely anything goes — especially given the Senate’s failure to act in any meaningful way on election security. Should he win, a sizable majority of the public will see it as an electoral coup and deny the validity of his claim to power.

If Senate Republicans hold their majority through an election that stinks of corruption, they’ll be dogged by the same crisis of legitimacy. If they nevertheless go on to use their dubious authority to continue stacking the courts and shielding the president from accountability, Americans won’t be wrong to conclude that our democracy has crumbled and that the United States has devolved into one of the world’s many soft-authoritarian kleptocracies claiming popular legitimacy from behind a cheap veneer of rigged elections. It can definitely happen here.

Senate Republicans who would vote in secret to remove Mr. Trump need to finally come to the defense of their country and do it in public. . . . . senators who choose to ignore the duties of their office in order to protect Mr. Trump will communicate with ringing clarity that they don’t care about having a fair election; that they don’t care whether the American people have really granted them the authority to govern; and that they think their own voters don’t care about any of this, either.

But the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, do care. The fainthearted lions of the Senate ought to bear in mind that a defiant citizenry inflamed by indignation and jealous of its rights can overwhelm a corrupt regime’s dirty electoral plans. An election with an impeached Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket is an invitation to an electoral uprising that should haunt Mitch McConnell’s dreams.