Remember the impeachment trial in the Senate? The one that didn’t happen because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Caucasian gaggle of sycophantic of Trump enablers chose to ignore the mountains of evidence pointing to these self-evident truths:
~That Donald Trump has repeatedly lied to the American people, used the presidency for personal financial gain, disrespected Congress, and violated the Constitution.
~That he directed a treasonous effort to involve the Kremlin in an effort to subvert the 2016 election.
~That he has behaved in a manner that not only does great discredit to the presidency but also greatly undermines America’s standing in the eyes of the world.
~That he has demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt
that HE IS MANIFESTLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT.
Remember, too, that it was Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, who issued this mendacious statement after the House of Representatives presented articles of impeachment to the Senate.
“Today House Democrats sent to the Senate the most rushed and unfair impeachment articles in modern history. They held secret hearings, released misleading information, and denied the president due process. This was a political stunt. Just one in three Americans say the process in the House was fair. Justice will finally be done – that will be in the Senate.”
A more compact pack of lies would be difficult to conjure. But then Sen. Barrasso was only doing what the Big Boss they were protecting does best.
Meanwhile, let’s remind our Republican friends of this fact: Article 1, Section 3, requires Senators to take an oath or affirmation to faithfully execute the laws when sitting to try impeachments.
Like the travesty that passed for a trial after the House impeached Donald Trump, the pageant playing out on America’s big-screen TVs this week is not a real political convention. It is a coronation.
It is not about electing a president by secret ballot in a fair contest. It is about preventing as many “people of color” as possible from voting. It’s about stealing what could well be the last contested election in American history. It is a coronation.
It’s a matter of surpassing importance to remember how we came to this inflection point when we go to the polls in November. To remember that Trump had plenty of help on Capitol Hill and in red-state capitals where Republican governors and legislatures have backed him at every turn. And now they are actively participating in a coronation.
Which is why it won’t be enough for voters collectively to fire the Liar-in-Chief. It won’t be enough to give the Biden-Harris ticket a popular majority. (Hillary Clinton won by nearly three million votes and still lost in the antediluvian anachronism we call the Electoral College.)
It also won’t even be enough for Biden to win a clear majority in the Electoral College. What’s needed is for Biden and Harris to win in a landslide.
What’s needed is for Biden to have the longest political coattails in the history of political coattails. That is, for Democrats to wrest control of the United States Senate from the unprincipled and oh-so-hypocritical pseudo-Republicans who have enabled this president.
The reason has nothing to do with partisan politics or ideology. There’s so much more at stake than whether we identify as Republicans or Democrats. Whether we think of ourselves as liberal, conservative, or blissfully independent.
The nation needs leaders in Congress, not lemmings. Congress is not powerless to restrain an unhinged president, it only looks that way because craven Republicans in Congress have put narrow partisanship and personal ambition above the public interest. Follow the money.
We do not have coronations in the United States because we do not have a king or queen. We do not have an emperor. Which is why we have a swearing in ceremony as prescribed in a written constitution.
It is found in Article II, Section One, Clause 8. According to the conservative Heritage Foundation, “The presidential oath requires much more than that general oath of allegiance and fidelity.” More precisely, it requires a pledge that he or she “will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
We are in the midst of an existential political crisis, one that too many Americans blithely shrug off because they do not—or cannot—believe the kind of power seizures, purges, and police-state repression that has happened in many other countries can ever happen here.
But, of course, it can. Which is why this election is all about saving America’s precarious democracy by restoring a proper balance-of- power among the three branches of the federal government. The only thing that stands between the coronation we are witnessing this week and the abolition of the Constitution…is us.
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