The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

Having been born in New York State and living there through high school, many in the South will never consider me a Southerner despite my maternal grandmother being a New Orleans belle. Nonetheless, I have lived in Virginia the majority of my life (I arrived not long after the Supreme Court's final ruling in Loving v. Virginia) and as a history major I am well aware of Virginia's conflicting legacy of on the one hand of having been the home of many of the Founding Fathers who espoused liberty and equality while on the other hand always time protecting white power/privilege and later serving as architect of the Jim Crow laws. A piece in The Atlantic by a legal scholar that I seemingly missed at the time looks at the Electoral College and how, when examined in the light of history, it has a racist origin originally aimed at maintaining the political power of southern slave holding states such as Virginia. As numerous posts on this blog have argued, the Electoral College needs to be eliminated. This article and the facts presented further bolster why that elimination needs to occur sooner as opposed to later. Here are article highlights: 

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the [U.S. Supreme Court's] Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. 

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

 

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

 

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

 

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

 

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

 

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. 

 

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

The Electoral College - the Founders' Biggest Mistake?

As posts on this blog noted back in 2016 after the 2016 presidential election, the Founding Fathers were fearful of direct election of the office of the presidency, being fearful that an unfit demagogue who would not put the interests of the nation first might be able to win the popular vote.  In retrospect, its as if they had a premonition of Donald Trump 227 years later. Their solution was the Electoral College that would have electors - individuals of knowledge and discernment - who could ignore the popular vote choose someone unfit.  That is not how things have worked out over American history with the most glaring failure occurring in 2016.  Equally troubling, as noted in a post yesterday, the structural advantage to Republicans under the Electoral College and the design for members of the U.S. Senate, opens the prospect that the loser of the popular vote and states with a smaller percentage of the nation's population will continue to win the presidency and thwart the will and interests of the majority of Americans.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this situation and pending Supreme Court cases which will confirm whether electors are free to act as envisioned by the Founders.  Personally, I deem it time for the Electoral College to be eliminated.  Here are article highlights:

The American people cast their ballots on a Tuesday in early November, but on a national level that vote is legally meaningless. The real election happens about six weeks later, when 538 presidential electors — most of them average citizens chosen by local party leaders — meet in their respective state capitals and cast their ballots.

Nearly always, the electors vote for the candidate who won the most popular votes in their state. But do they have to? That’s the question that the Supreme Court has agreed to answer in two related cases it will hear this spring. The cases — one from Colorado and one from Washington — raise an alarming prospect: Can presidential electors vote for whomever they please, disregarding what the voters of their state said?

More than 160 “faithless electors” have chosen to go this route since the nation’s founding, a tiny fraction of all electoral votes in history. But the issue has become freshly relevant because of a concerted effort to persuade dozens of Republican electors in 2016 to switch their votes to prevent Donald Trump from taking the White House. In the end, 10 electors voted or tried to vote for someone other than their state’s popular-vote winner — the most in a single election in more than a century.

Last May, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the state had the power to impose a $1,000 fine on its four faithless electors, on the ground that the Constitution gives the states total authority to decide how to appoint their electors.

Three months later, a federal appeals court in Denver went the opposite way, ruling that the founders clearly intended for electors to act independently and vote according to their consciences, not to the dictates of any political party. Once a state appoints an elector, the court said, its power over that elector ends. They cannot punish someone, or replace him or her, for voting a certain way.

The framers of the Constitution, and the states that ratified it, clearly expected electors to vote as they pleased. In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that electors would be men “selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass” and “most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

And yet, the Electoral College has almost never worked that way in practice. Less than a decade after the Constitution was drafted, the framers’ idea of an independent elector was effectively kaput. As soon as national political parties took shape, elections became a partisan competition, and it was only logical that electors would start to take sides. In the election of 1796, electors were already pledging themselves either to John Adams, the sitting vice president and Federalist, or to Thomas Jefferson, the former secretary of state and Democratic-Republican.

Even the term “faithless” is revealing: What faith is an elector who votes his or her conscience breaking? Didn’t the founders intend electors to be faithful above all to the country?

Yes — and yet they are not now and essentially never have been. For this reason, however the Supreme Court resolves the issue, which it will do by early summer, little will change in practice. Political parties and their candidates, who currently choose their own slate of electors in each state, are already careful about selecting people for their partisan loyalty.

And faithless electors are unlikely to affect the outcome even if the Electoral College tally is very close, as it was in 2000, when as few as three Republican electors could have broken their pledges and handed the presidency to the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, who won the most votes nationwide. None did.

Americans would rightly revolt if a handful of people they’d never heard of ignored their votes and decided the election for themselves. It’s almost as if we believe that we, the people, should be voting directly for the president — the only official whose job it is to represent all of us equally, wherever we live. Which raises the question of why we still have an Electoral College at all.

Is Pete Buttigieg Too Young to Be President?

America currently finds itself with an occupant of the White House who is a malignant narcissist, who doesn't read, disregards the wisdom of experts, and acts on impulse and Twitter rants. It would seem almost anyone would be more fit to occupy the White House rather than Trump. Of the leading Democrat candidates for the presidential nomination, three - Biden, Sanders and Warren - are at an age where many people begin to fail physically in terms of stamina and cognition.  The fourth, Pete Buttigieg, is at the other end of the spectrum age wise and the persistent question of his critics is whether he is too young, despite his high education (Trump will not even allow his academic grades to be released) and poise. Buttigieg points out - as Virginians who know history - the Founders were very young, Jefferson being a mere 33 when he authored the Declaration of Independence.  A column in the New York Times looks at this question of age.  It doesn't answer the question, but give much to think about, including the crucial need to remove Donald Trump from the White House.  Here are excerpts:

Finland just elected the world’s youngest prime minister, Sanna Marin, who’s 34. Time magazine named Greta Thunberg, 16, its youngest-ever “Person of the Year.”

Even before I could mention their names to Pete Buttigieg, who’s vying to become the youngest American president, he brought them up. He also brought up Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, who was 37 when she took office, and Emmanuel Macron, who became the president of France at 39.

That’s how old Buttigieg, now 37, would be at his inauguration.

“This country was founded by 20-somethings,” he added, referring to the fact that Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, were in their 20s on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson was 33. John Hancock was 39.

Donald Trump is 73, meaning that he has more than a half-century of life lessons on some of them. How does that show? Well, an hour before I connected with Buttigieg, the president saw fit to tweet that Time’s choice of Thunberg, a Swedish climate-change activist, was “so ridiculous” and that she should “work on her Anger Management problem.” Facing imminent impeachment, he started a Twitter spat with a teenage girl.

Trump is the “most extreme example of the fact that while wisdom and age may be related, they’re very much not the same thing,” Buttigieg said.

Still. Age isn’t irrelevant. America is much, much bigger than Finland and much, much more complicated than it was during the Revolutionary War. In a country so powerful, at such a perilous time, is Buttigieg simply too young and too green to lead the way?

It’s the question that hovers over a presidential campaign whose success has stunned the political world.

And even now, after first-place finishes in some recent polls of Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s pressed about whether someone with his short résumé, capped by two terms as the mayor of a city of just 100,000 people, could possibly be up to the presidency and pass muster with enough Americans to get elected. So we spent most of a nearly hourlong car ride between campaign stops in the New York City area talking about it. He conceded that the longer you’re alive, “the more you learn,” and that there are lessons and life passages still in the offing for him. He’d like to be a parent, but if he succeeds on his current quest, he’d become the leader of the free world first.

“A lot of things in my life have been out of sequence,” he said. “I was a mayor before I got married. I was a war veteran before I had dated.” He was referring to his seven months in Afghanistan and recognizing that while he has been precociously ahead of the game in many regards, he was behind in others. It was only four years ago, at 33, that he finally had a serious romantic relationship — with the man, Chasten, who is now his husband.

Age has played out in surprising ways in the Democratic primary. While Buttigieg is unusually young, the other three candidates grouped with him at the head of the pack — Joe Biden, 77; Elizabeth Warren, 70; and Bernie Sanders, 78 — are unusually old. The oldest candidate, Sanders, is by far the most popular among the youngest Democratic voters, getting the support of 52 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 in a national Quinnipiac poll released on Tuesday. Buttigieg got just 2 percent of that group, in contrast with 12 percent of Democratic voters between 35 and 49, 12 percent of those between 50 and 64 and 11 percent of those 65 and older. He attributed that to younger voters’ attraction to Sanders’s less pragmatic, more ideologically pure vision. It’s certainly not because Buttigieg hasn’t courted them. In this “O.K. Boomer” moment of younger Americans’ disgust with the income inequality, social injustices and climate change that older Americans have bequeathed them, he has claimed a generational perspective that separates him from his rivals for the Democratic nomination. He also makes the case that people of Biden’s, Warren’s and Sanders’s age have had their chance to fix things. Shouldn’t someone with an arguably fresher outlook — someone from outside Washington — take a turn? With that reasoning he frames political vulnerabilities as political virtues. . . . “It means that one generation has been in charge for a very long time.”

Buttigieg has to muster extra poise, extra confidence, lest any deficit be interpreted as immaturity. But then that poise and confidence, in the context of his age, are interpreted as arrogance. His detractors constantly tell me that he’s cocky — or robotic.

“One of the things I get is, ‘Why aren’t you more passionate?’” he said. “I’m very passionate. But I’m also very disciplined. If I weren’t, it would be harder to be taken seriously.”

The Constitution decrees that a House member must be at least 25, a senator at least 30, a president at least 35. No American president has been under 40, and only two took office before the age of 45: Teddy Roosevelt, who was 42, and John F. Kennedy, who was 43.

Shouldn’t and doesn’t that give Buttigieg pause?

“Of course you have those moments,” he acknowledged. “We’re talking about a role of unbelievable importance and complexity and challenge. And yet every person who’s done it has been a mortal, a human being — and of course so much depends not just on the individual but on how you build a team.”

He repeated something that he has said scores if not hundreds of times on the campaign trail: As mayor of South Bend, Ind., for the past eight years, he has had a kind of executive experience that someone who has served in Congress for that long or longer hasn’t. Besides, he said, experience isn’t the only font of wisdom. Education matters. Intuition, too.

He comes armed with historical examples beyond the founders of people who made remarkable contributions early on. “I’m not going to compare myself to Martin Luther King,” he said, “but he’s certainly an example of somebody who had a huge impact, mainly in his 30s.” King died at 39.

Maybe he’d match up well against Trump. I’m not sure, and how I wish I were, because the likeliest Trump slayer is the Democratic nominee I want and America needs. Both substantively and in terms of electability, Buttigieg would be better off if he were older, with higher positions under his belt, but then all of the leading Democrats have worrying shortcomings. His youth is a concern. It shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

George Conway: Ukraine Allegations Warrant Trump's Impeachment

Trump claiming he can do whatever he wants
as sycophant Pence looks on.

Other than perhaps his poor choice when it comes to who he married, New York attorney George Conway is on the mark when he and a constitutional law professor argue that the latest Donald Trump scandal - there are so many they are hard to count - may be the one to warrant Trump's removal from office. No doubt Trump cultist followers who seemingly are motivated only by their racism and religious extremism will care less.  All they want is someone who hates the same people they do and who will speak loudly in ways that in the putrid minds legitimize their own hate and bigotry. Sadly, most Americans nowadays know little of how America's federal government is designed to work and that the office of the presidency is not akin to a monarchy with no limits to presidential power - something Trump has claimed as reported in Roll Call.  Of course, anyone who has followed Trump's real estate career could have foretold that Trump has always seen himself above the law (one reason New Yorkers despise him so vehemently).  Conway's latest column, this time in the Washington Post, looks at Trump's latest transgression and makes the case that true American patriots - which excludes his hypocrisy filled and hatred driven base - should be demanding that Congress act to remove this cancerous force from power.  Here are column excerpts:

Among the most delicate choices the framers made in drafting the Constitution was how to deal with a president who puts himself above the law. To address that problem, they chose the mechanism of impeachment and removal from office. And they provided that this remedy could be used when a president commits “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” 

Simply put, the framers viewed the president as a fiduciary, the government of the United States as a sacred trust and the people of the United States as the beneficiaries of that trust. Through the Constitution, the framers imposed upon the president the duty and obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and made him swear an oath that he would fulfill that duty of faithful execution. They believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.

That’s exactly what appears to be at issue today. A whistleblower in U.S. intelligence lodged a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general so alarming that he labeled it of “urgent concern” and alerted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Though the details remain secret, apparently this much can be gleaned: The complaint is against the president. It concerns a “promise” that the president made, in at least one phone call, with a foreign leader. And it involves Ukraine and possible interference with the next presidential election. The complaint is being brazenly suppressed by the Justice Department — in defiance of a whistleblower law that says, without exception, the complaint “shall” be turned over to Congress. 

We also know this: As he admitted Thursday night on CNN, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been trying to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate, among other things, one of Trump’s potential Democratic opponents, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter about the latter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump held up the delivery of $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which is under constant threat from neighboring Russia. He had a phone conversation on July 25 with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, the call included a discussion of Ukraine’s need to “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”

So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. The president’s efforts were impeachable because, in committing those obstructive acts, he put his personal interests above the nation’s: He tried to stop an investigation into whether a hostile foreign power, Russia, tried to interfere with our democracy — simply because he seemed to find it personally embarrassing. Trump breached his duty of faithful execution to the nation not only because he likely broke the law but also because, through his disregard for the law, he put his self-interest first.

The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump’s actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information.

It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago. 

Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow.

Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.

The Founders Would Be Revolted By Trump, Today’s Republicans

As perhaps a majority of Republicans continue to gush about Donald Trump's Soviet-style parade and military display on July 4th and his regime's human rights abuses continue on the nation's southern border, those who know accurate history of America are revolted by what they have witnessed - many of us refused to tune in - and are struck by just disgusted the Founding Fathers would be.  Significant portions of Republicans now support government censorship of the free press while a majority believe that Christianity should be made the nation's established religion.  Anyone versed in accurate history of the nation understands that these views were anathema to the Founding Fathers. A column in the New York Times looks at the increasingly anti-American positions of today's Republicans, not mention Der Trumpenführer.  Here are column highlights:

Kids in cages and tanks for the tyrant. After that dictator-friendly Fourth of July, it’s time for all true patriots to conduct a political gut check.

Like many people, I’m worried about the Democrats. A majority of Americans are desperate for someone to dislodge the despot from the White House. And yet some Democrats are pushing policy positions — such as taking away private health insurance from more than 150 million people — that are deeply unpopular. The smarter candidates will rethink this, and soon, or otherwise ensure that an awful American aberration is more than a one-off.

But as troubled as I am by the Democrats, I’m terrified of the Republicans. In numerous surveys of a party that has adopted the worst pathologies of President Trump, Republicans have shown themselves to be explicitly anti-American. The Founders would gag. So would Abraham Lincoln.

Consider the Republicans’ view of the First Amendment, the most sacred of the freedoms embedded in this country’s governing blueprint. Just under half of Republicans now believe government should be able to shut down “biased or inaccurate media.” And close to half of Republicans have adopted Trump’s authoritarian view that the news media is “the enemy of the people.”

I don’t expect Republicans to know Thomas Jefferson’s words by heart — that if he were forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” This from a man who was subject to a lifetime of biased and inaccurate press.

But what part of “Congress shall make no law” abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, do these citizens not understand?

Regarding the other foundational liberty in the First Amendment, restricting an “establishment of religion” by the state, the cult of Trump would throw that under a steamroller of bigotry as well.

A majority of Republicans think Christianity should be the established national religion. And half of all Southerners — the deepest, most anti-American part of Trump’s base, with the DNA of Civil War traitors still coursing through the region — believe the United States was founded as an “explicitly Christian” nation.

George Washington made clear it was otherwise in a letter to a Jewish congregation in 1790 celebrating religious tolerance and diversity. “The citizens of the United States have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy,” he wrote.

Jefferson expressed a similar feeling, touting a homeland for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

So, quick summary: Republicans of today would not approve of the First Amendment as written. They would give Big Government free rein to quash dissenting voices in the press, and would prefer a merging of church and state.

[A]s they have picked up Trump’s hatreds as their own, Republicans have turned a cold shoulder to the wretched masses yearning to breathe free. Less than 40 percent of Republicans, in three recent polls, now believe immigrants are a benefit to the country. This could be because of ignorance: Even though the vast majority, 77 percent, of immigrants in this country are legal, a plurality of Republicans believe they are not.

Trump has compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, which is like comparing a noxious weed to a redwood tree.

The modern-day Know-Nothings are the pink-faced mobs calling for a wall at Trump rallies. They are the architects of a government policy that puts children in filthy cages and forces them to drink fetid water, that sees helpless and newly orphaned babies as subhuman — all while laughing at the cruelty.

You can see why Republicans with a sense of history and fealty to the great sweep of their party’s finer principles describe themselves as politically homeless in 2019.

And when Trump rolls out weapons of war to celebrate the birth of a nation that never even had much of a standing army until the 20th century, you can see why passionate pride in this country is at its lowest point since Gallup started measuring this sentiment in the modern era.

Democracy is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Declaration of Independence, as the historian Virginia Anderson recently noted. It’s a human construct, more fragile than any of us believed until now. But when it’s gone, no one should be surprised.

A piece in The Atlantic continues this theme by looking at Trump's so-called speech at his Red Square like event.  Here are excerpts:

Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it. Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. A great country is one that is feared by its enemies, that can inflict more devastating destruction than any other.

Devotion. Unity. History. Fighting. But not: Democracy. Justice. Individuality. Peace.

From time to time, one of Trump’s more devout speechwriters will try to insert references to God into the president’s mouth. Those references never sound natural from the least spiritual president in the nation’s history. They were, fascinatingly, all but absent from this speech commemorating the independence of a nation, in the apt phrase of G. K. Chesterton, with the soul of a church. Instead, there was only vainglorious boasting: See our wealth, see our power, see our glorious triumphs over the mounded corpses of our enemies. We will always win, because we always fight.

No non-American could watch that spectacle at the Lincoln Memorial and feel that America stood for anything good or right or universal. Power worshipped power, for its own sake.

“We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.” That sentence of self-congratulation toward the end of Trump’s speech was probably lodged in the clipboard memory of some 1980s vintage word processor hauled from the Executive Office Building.

It’s bumpf, a thousand times typed, a thousand times said. And yet this July 4, after all the rodomontade that preceded it, I found myself paying attention to those hackneyed words in a way I never had before. Will Americans always be that people? Are Americans that people now?

Be very, very afraid.

Trump is a Threat to Religious Freedom

For the record, I am no fan of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who I believe will prove harmful to the Democrat Party.  That said, recent attacks on her by Der  Trumpenführer further underscore the religious based bigotry that permeates Trump's view of Muslims and Islam.  Every religion seemingly has its dangerous extremists who hold animus towards those of other faiths (and sexual orientation), and Christianity is no exception.   Look no farther than the racists evangelicals who continue to support the morally reprehensible Trump. But Trump's attacks on Omar and Islam threaten a core value of the Founding Fathers who knew well the dangers of an established church and sought to protect religious freedom for all religious faiths. A column by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at why Trump's attacks on Islam are so dangerous and ultimately threaten the religious freedom on all Americans.  Here are highlights:

SO ANOTHER norm of public decency falls, like a historical building demolished to make way for one of Donald Trump's tasteless towers.

When the president of the United States goes after an American Muslim — in this case Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who came to the U.S. as a Somali refugee — using images of the 9/11 attacks, it is cruel, frightening and dangerous in new ways.

It is cruel because Trump essentially delivered his political rant while standing on desecrated graves. The images he employed not only included burning buildings but burning human beings, drafted into a sad and sordid political ploy. Is nothing sacred to Trump? When said aloud, the question sounds like an absurdity. Trump has never given the slightest indication of propriety, respect or reverence. His narcissism leaves no room to honor other people or to honor other gods.

Now, the victims of violence are treated as villains in Trump's fictional version of global threats. On the strength of such calumnies, Trump has essentially destroyed America's asylum system.

This has led to a frightening state of affairs. By all the evidence, Trump is an anti-Muslim bigot. At one campaign event in 2015, a member of the audience stated, "We have a problem in this country; it's called Muslims." And he went on to ask, "When can we get rid of them?" Trump responded: "We're going to be looking at that and plenty of other things." Imagine a normal politician on the left or right being asked about the possibility of getting rid of all the Christians, or getting rid of all the Jews. They would likely use such a moment to clarify that they aren't, in fact, insanely prejudiced monsters. Trump used such a moment to affirm the instinct of mass deportation and to promise a range of other anti-Muslim actions.

Could this have been a slip of the tongue? No, it wasn't. Trump has a long history of animus — raw animus — against one of the Abrahamic faiths. He has said, "We're having problems with the Muslims." And: "There is a Muslim problem in the world." And: "Islam hates us."

He has claimed: "You have people coming out of mosques with hatred and death in their eyes." He once called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." He has variously and publicly considered the closing of mosques, warrantless searches, and the creation of a national database to track Muslims. 

[Trump] The president claims to have seen "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims cheering on 9/11 when the towers fell — a lie and a libel. He attacked a Muslim Gold Star mother, claiming that she "wasn't allowed" to speak at the Democratic convention because of her faith — a lie and a libel. He has praised Gen. John Pershing for executing Muslim insurgents in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig's blood — a historical myth, but a revealing fantasy of anti-Muslim war crimes.

This is not only rank religious bigotry; it is the attitude most likely to alienate some Muslims from American ideals and turn a dangerous few toward radicalism and violence.

None of this requires us to believe that Omar is a wise or thoughtful public figure. She isn't. She traffics in the worst anti-Semitic tropes. But Trump's perception of religious liberty as freedom only for the faiths he prefers is a potential threat to every religious group.

Religious freedom is either rigorously equal, or it becomes an instrument of those in power to favor or disfavor religions of their choice. And those believers who are currently in favor may someday discover what disfavor is like.

Is the United States Becoming and Oligarchy?

While the United States still has the political trappings of a democracy, economically, it seems rapidly headed toward becoming an oligarchy where wealth and power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the few.  Not since the Gilded Age have we seen such extremes in wealth and and such concentrated attacks on safety and environmental protection regulations. Such attacks are, of course are motivated so that the few can amass even more wealth even as average citizens suffer physically and economically. As a column in the New York Times notes, this is NOT the model that the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Instead, they favored a political and economic system where "the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained."  This concept could not be further than the model pushed by the Trump/Pence regime and today's GOP which favors the few over the many.   To win in November, 2020 - and November 2019 here in Virginia - Democrats need to push the vision of the Founders and rebut Trump's efforts to label them all as socialists (except Bernie Sanders, who outright states he's a socialist).  Here are column excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg, who’s shown an impressive knack for putting matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race, nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism. Of course I’m a capitalist, he said; America “is a capitalist society.”

But, he continued: “It’s got to be democratic capitalism.”

Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that’s no longer the kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this country. “If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,” he said. “It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.”

[H]is rhetoric reminds us of a crucial point: There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy.

After all, oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.

But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change.

Democracy can’t flourish in a context of grotesque concentration of wealth. This idea is neither new nor radical nor alien. It is old, mainstream and as American as Thomas Jefferson.

I invoke Jefferson for a reason. Everyone knows how he was occupying his time in the summer of 1776; he was writing the Declaration of Independence. But what was he up to that fall? He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was taking the lead in writing and sponsoring legislation to abolish the commonwealth’s laws upholding “entail” (which kept large estates within families across generations) and primogeniture.
He believed, as the founders did generally, that excess inherited wealth was fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

They were most concerned with inherited wealth, as was the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whom conservatives invoke constantly today but who would in fact be appalled by the propagandistic phrase “death tax” — in their time, inherited wealth was the oppressive economic problem.

They saw clearly the link between democratic health and general economic prosperity. Here is John Adams, not exactly Jefferson’s best friend: All elements of society, he once wrote, must “cooperate in this one democratical principle, that the end of all government is the happiness of the People: and in this other, that the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained.” “Happiness” to the founders meant economic well-being, and note that Adams called it “democratical.”

So, yes, democracy and the kind of economic inequality we’ve seen in this country in recent decades don’t mix.

A number of scholars have made these arguments in recent years, notably Ganesh Sitaraman in his book “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.” All that work has been vitally important. But now that some politicians are saying it, we can finally have the broad national conversation we’ve desperately needed for years.

Bernie Sanders has proposed an inheritance tax that the founders would love, and Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax of which they’d surely approve. But you don’t have to be a supporter of either of those candidates or their plans to get behind the general idea that great concentration of wealth is undemocratic.

Policies built around this idea will not turn America into the Soviet Union or, in the au courant formulation, Venezuela. They will make it the nation the founders intended. And this, as Mr. Buttigieg’s words suggest, is how Democratic candidates should answer the socialism question (with the apparent exception of the socialist Mr. Sanders). No, I’m a capitalist. And that’s why I want capitalism to change.

Movement to End Electoral College Gains Momentum

The Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College as a backstop to prevent an unfit individual from becoming President of the United States.  For the system to work, of course, electors had to put the good of the nation first and be willing to take political heat if they acted to prevent the election of an unfit demagogue.  Sadly, it 2016 the Electors failed to do their constitutional duty and the consequence was that we now have the most unfit and foul individual in the history of the nation occupying the White House and doing incalculable damage to America both at home and abroad.  Making matters worse, congressional Republicans utterly failed to restrain the misconduct of the executive branch.  The result is now that there is a growing movement among states to amend their own laws so that their electoral votes will go to the winner of the popular vote nationally and not simply whichever candidate wins in their state.  If the movement grows, the consequences for the GOP could be catastrophic since its candidates have failed to win the popular vote in two out of the last five presidential elections.  Needless to say, Republicans who increasingly cannot win on their policies and who want to rid the votes of those who do not support their extreme agenda do not support the concept of one person, one vote.  A piece in NPR looks at this urgent need - a true national emergency - to avoid future presidents who failed to win the popular vote.  Here are highlights: 

An attempt at an Electoral College workaround is gaining momentum in the Mountain West.

Democrats in Colorado and New Mexico are pushing ahead with legislation to pledge their 14 collective electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — no matter who wins each state.

The plan only goes into effect if the law passes in states representing an electoral majority. That threshold is 270 votes, which is the same number needed to win the presidency.

Democrats have been stung by the fact that President Trump's victory marked the second time in five cycles that a Democrat lost the presidency while winning the popular vote. 2016 was the most egregious example, with Hillary Clinton winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but losing the election. It was the largest margin ever for someone who won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College.

Proponents of the national popular vote measures have argued that it's not political, but Republicans, who have benefited in recent elections from the Electoral College system, disagree.

And while a majority of the country has expressed support for giving the presidency to the person who wins the most votes — 55 percent in the latest Pew Research Center poll — there are sharp partisan divides.

So far, 11 states — including New York, California and New Jersey — have joined the effort along with the District of Columbia, putting the effort 98 votes short of its goal.

Colorado appears poised to join as the 12th state. The state legislature passed the bill Thursday, and Gov. Jared Polis is expected to sign it. In New Mexico, the legislation is awaiting consideration in the state Senate after the House approved it earlier this month.

[A] potential loophole in the Constitution — that while the Electoral College is in the Constitution, nothing says a candidate who wins a state has to get all of its electoral votes. . . . . In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not have "winner-take-all" systems. They allocate their electoral votes to presidential candidates by congressional district, with an additional two electoral votes going to the winner of the state.

Colorado state Sen. Mike Foote, who's sponsoring legislation, insisted that it's not a partisan response to Trump's 2016 win. Rather, he said, it's about upholding the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

"It's about time that every vote in the country counts equally," he said. "Right now, if you live in a state that is not a battleground state, then your vote doesn't count nearly as much."

Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who represents the plains east of Denver, worries about the impact of a popular vote on rural America. He said it would lead candidates to only campaign in the largest media markets, like New York and Los Angeles. Only Democratic-leaning states have joined so far. Swing states, like Ohio and Florida, have the least reason to sign on, which means it likely needs support from deep red states.

There's also a broader question as to whether it would be constitutional. The Electoral College is clearly written into the nation's founding document. Some insist that Congress would have to approve it since it would overhaul national election procedures. Other scholars have argued that states can't bind their electors to voters outside their boundaries.

Koza insists Article II gives states broad power to decide how they choose electoral delegates. Still, he expects a series of lawsuits if enough of the National Popular Vote efforts went into effect.

"It's about saying the status quo is unacceptable," he said. "This might not be the best way of changing it, but it's at least a way of forcing some change and forcing some discussion of it."

As for weakening the influence of rural voters, I am all for it.  Rural areas are the principal base for the racism and religious extremism that the GOP seeks to inflict on the majority of Americans.  Their ability to do so needs to end.  

The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump

I have always viewed Donald Trump as unfit for office both due to his total immorality and his greed and never ending quest for self-enrichment.  It's telling that New Yorkers who knew him best and had most closely witnessed his skirting of the law and questionable business practices overwhelming voted against him.  Indeed, Trump embodies the personification of the type of individual the Founding Fathers feared and caused them to build in two safeguards for the nation.  The first was the Electoral College which was empowered to overturn the election of a dangerous and immoral demagogue to protect the nation.  Sadly, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the electors failed to uphold their constitutional duty and instead rubber stamped the Trump victory even though he had lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and had already displayed his unfitness for office throughout the campaign.  The second mechanism to protect the nation was impeachment whereby an unfit and dangerous occupant of the White House could be removed from office. Given the failure of the Electors to do their duty, a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic makes the case for beginning impeachment proceedings now against Donald Trump.  It's very long and deserves a full read.  Here are substantial highlights: 

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.

“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” the late senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain lamented last summer. “The president has not risen to the mantle of the office,” the GOP’s other recent nominee, the former governor and now senator Mitt Romney, wrote in January.

The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency.

More troubling still, Trump has demanded that public officials put their loyalty to him ahead of their duty to the public. On his first full day in office, he ordered his press secretary to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd. He never forgave his first attorney general for failing to shut down investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ultimately forced his resignation. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump told his first FBI director, and then fired him when he refused to pledge it. . . . His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.

As for the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, Trump has repeatedly trampled upon them. He pledged to ban entry to the United States on the basis of religion, and did his best to follow through. He has attacked the press as the “enemy of the people” and barred critical outlets and reporters from attending his events. He has assailed black protesters. He has called for his critics in private industry to be fired from their jobs. He has falsely alleged that America’s electoral system is subject to massive fraud, impugning election results with which he disagrees as irredeemably tainted.

[T]he Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.

Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.

That is precisely backwards. . . . . Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.

The fight over whether Trump should be removed from office is already raging, and distorting everything it touches. . . . . By denying the debate its proper outlet, Congress has succeeded only in intensifying its pressures. And by declining to tackle the question head-on, it has deprived itself of its primary means of reining in the chief executive.

With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.

In no small part, this trepidation is due to the fact that the last effort to remove an American president from office ended in political fiasco. When the House impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, his popularity soared; in the Senate, even some Republicans voted against convicting him of the charges.

Pelosi and her antediluvian leadership team served in Congress during those fights two decades ago, and they seem determined not to repeat their rivals’ mistakes. . . . . To move against Trump now, Democrats seem to believe, would only strengthen the president’s hand. Better to wait for public opinion to turn decisively against him and then use impeachment to ratify that view. This is the received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years: House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.

Congress can’t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors. No one knows when Mueller’s report will arrive, what form it will take, or what it will say. Even if Mueller alleges criminal misconduct on the part of the president, under Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nor will the host of congressional hearings fulfill that branch’s obligations. . . . . Only by authorizing a dedicated impeachment inquiry can the House begin to assemble disparate allegations into a coherent picture, forcing lawmakers to consider both whether specific charges are true and whether the president’s abuses of his power justify his removal.

Waiting also presents dangers. With every passing day, Trump further undermines our national commitment to America’s ideals. And impeachment is a long process. . . . By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.

Democrats’ fear—that impeachment will backfire on them—is likewise unfounded. The mistake Republicans made in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn’t a matter of timing. They identified real and troubling misconduct—then applied the wrong remedy to fix it. Clinton’s acts disgraced the presidency, and his lies under oath and efforts to obstruct the investigation may well have been crimes. The question that determines whether an act is impeachable, though, is whether it endangers American democracy.

Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has lied or dishonored the presidency. The most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.

The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.

[T]his sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes. . . . The protections of the process alone are formidable. They come in five distinct forms.

The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. . . . . Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.

As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. . . . It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.

The most a president generally has to fear from congressional hearings is embarrassment; there is always an aide to take the fall. Impeachment puts his own job on the line, and demands every hour of his day. . . . . There may be no more effective way to run out the clock on an administration than to tie it up with impeachment hearings.

But the advantages of impeachment are not merely tactical. The third benefit is its utility as a tool of discovery and discernment. . . . The process of impeachment can also surface evidence. . . . . The evidence that drove Nixon from office thus emerged as a consequence of the impeachment hearings; it did not spark them. The only way for the House to find out what Trump has actually done, and whether his conduct warrants removal, is to start asking.

Hosting that debate in Congress yields a fourth benefit: defusing the potential for an explosion of political violence. . . . . A system without a mechanism for removing the chief executive, he [Benjamin Franklin] argued, offered an invitation to violence. Just as the courts took the impulse toward vigilante justice and safely channeled it into the protections of the legal system, impeachment took the impulse toward political violence and safely channeled it into Congress.

[T]he overwhelming majority of political violence is committed by the far right, albeit on a considerably smaller scale than in the Nixon era. Trump himself has warned that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, a warning that echoes earlier eras.

The predictions were wrong then, as Trump’s are likely wrong now. The public understood that once the impeachment process began, the real action would take place in Congress, and not in the streets. Johnson knew that inciting his supporters to violence would erode congressional support just when he needed it most. That seems the most probable outcome today as well. If impeached, Trump would lose the luxury of venting his resentments before friendly crowds, stirring their anger. His audience, by political necessity, would become a few dozen senators in Washington.

And what if the Senate does not convict Trump? The fifth benefit of impeachment is that, even when it fails to remove a president, it severely damages his political prospects. Johnson, abandoned by Republicans and rejected by Democrats, did not run for a second term.  . . . . If Congress were to impeach Trump, whatever short-term surge he might enjoy as supporters rallied to his defense, his long-term political fate would likely be sealed.

Today, the United States once more confronts a president who seems to care for only some of the people he represents, who promises his supporters that he can roll back the tide of diversity, who challenges the rule of law, and who regards constitutional rights and liberties as disposable. Congress must again decide whether the greater risk lies in executing the Constitution as it was written, or in deferring to voters to do what it cannot muster the courage to do itself. The gravest danger facing the country is not a Congress that seeks to measure the president against his oath—it is a president who fails to measure up to that solemn promise.