impeachment – Fluid Imagination

I haven’t written a post about President Trump since July 2017. I believed then that his impeachment was “only a matter of time,” and while I was correct in my prediction, I did not expect it to take another sixteen months and a whole other scandal for Democrats to feel emboldened enough to defend the Constitution against this bona fide con-man.

So much shit has happened since my last post, and this impotent excuse for an impeachment seems hardly the most significant, especially when compared to the number of tragedies that have befallen so many families thanks to the policies and actions of this president and his administration.

While I support this impeachment and believe it has a just cause, I supported impeaching this president long before he engaged in a quid pro quo with the leaders of Ukraine.

I supported it when he violated the human rights of Central American refugees.

I supported it when he refused to divest from his business interests and increased his corporate profits through the use of his office.

I supported it when he gave aid and comfort to white supremacists, not only by supporting them with words, but by employing them in key positions in his administration and allowing them to determine the immigration policy of this country.

I supported it when it came to light that he broke campaign finance laws by paying women to remain silent about their extra-marital affairs with him, and that he did so during his campaign for political office.

I supported it when he admitted to taking money donated to his charity and using it for his personal gain.

I supported it when he demanded his FBI Director express loyalty to him rather than to the people’s laws.

I supported it when he asked top intelligence officials to lie to the American people about the existence of an investigation into his campaign.

I supported it when he admitted on national television that he fired his FBI Director because he wanted to stop an investigation into his campaign.

I supported it when he advocated, in a public speech, for police brutality; when he advocated, in a public speech, for mob violence; and when he advocated, in a pardon, for members of the military to commit war crimes.

Unfortunately, while the 2018 election changed the balance of power in the House of Representatives, the Republican majority in the Senate seems willing to piss on the Constitution if it gives them another judge on the bench and another tax break in their pocket.

***

My question is: why do national Republican politicians in the House & Senate prefer President Trump over Vice-President Pence? Surely, a Pence Administration would be more effective when it comes to accomplishing Republican goals. Imagine how many of their policies they could have implemented by now if the Executive Branch had its shit together?

What does the Republican party gain by keeping President Trump as its standard bearer? According to polls, President Trump has a favorability spread of -13, while Vice-President Pence’s is -6, which means that while both of them are disliked, fewer people dislike the Vice-President. If the polls are accurate, they suggest President Trump does not give Republicans a significant advantage in the voting booth.

It may be true that President Trump can attract more non-traditional voters than Vice-President Pence, but I suspect he also compels more Democrats to vote than normally would.

It also seems as if this impeachment could be used by the Republicans as an opportunity to rejigger their electorate away from the vitriol instigated by the Tea Party and towards a more judicial use of the nation’s corporate and military might.

I assume Republican Senators are afraid of being “primary-ed” should they vote to find President Trump guilty of the House’s charges, but they should use this vote to persuade more reasonable people to join their party. Think of a Republican party that actually works to further true democratic (small d) and entrepreneurially-friendly values. You know…like Republicans are supposed to do?

In addition, think of how much having a President Pence atop the 2020 Republican ticket would screw up Democratic talking points. V.P. Pence does not have a history of kowtowing to dictators, sympathizing with avowed white supremacists, or being a hardline anti-immigrant, robbing Democrats of those easy points.

All of which begs the question: why do Republicans hate Mike Pence so much?

Last week, in the wake of President Trump’s decision to attack three chemical-weapons facilities in Syria, Senator Sanders said:

President Trump has no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria. It is Congress, not the president, who determines whether our country goes to war and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility…If President Trump believes that expanding the war in Syria will bring stability to the region and protect American interests, he should come to Congress with his ideas.

I shared Sen. Sanders’ comment on Facebook a few days after he released it, and a family member of mine wrote, “This has been disputed since the dawn of time and never stopped. [If a Republican President does it, the Democrats] bitch, and vise versa.”

My family member was not wrong, but I wanted to look a little deeper into it. So I read this interview with a constitutional lawyer about whether the bombing was illegal. He answers that, “to be legal, the strike would have to be authorized either by some act of Congress or by the president’s own powers under Article II of the Constitution.”

The interview turns on the question of whether the attack fits the powers granted in Article II. Presidents of both parties have used them to explain any aggressive military decisions made without the approval of Congress, but, according to the constitutional lawyer, “the only condition the Supreme Court has ever expressly endorsed is to ‘repel sudden attacks,’ which basically means the president doesn’t have to wait for Congressional authorization to respond militarily to an attack against us.”

No reasonable person could conclude that President Trump authorized missile strikes on Syria last week to repel a sudden attack against the United States, so it would seem his decision was illegal.

But if his decision was illegal, so were the actions of the military men and women who enacted his decision. As this article in Counterpunch explains, “the moral and legal obligation [of members of the U.S.’s armed forces] is to the U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice].”

I don’t want to indict the men and women in the armed forces who carried out the President’s order, but I would like put their superior officers on trial.

It is getting to the point in this country where there’s a more than decent chance that shit is about to go down. Every day that Special Counsel Mueller gets closer to his quarry is one more day the President and his allies have to get squirrelly. If we really believe this President is in cahoots with other uber-rich oligarchs, then we have to believe he has no true loyalty to any particular nation. His loyalty, like his wealth, is transnational, and any nationalistic bird whistle in his message is just that, a song he sings to lure a flock of innocents into his cage.

The day is coming when he is going to turn to the senior members of his military and command them to ‘repel a sudden attack’ from his true domestic enemies, and they’re going to have to decide if they follow his unlawful order. Will they defend the person of the President or will they defend the Constitution?

To enforce the representative power of the nation once again, Congress ought to call the military to account. If this President sees himself above and beyond the law, nothing Congress can do will stop him, short of a guilty verdict of impeachment. In light of that near impossibility (pre-January 2019), Congress ought to demand publicly-sworn loyalty oaths from the senior officers of the United States military.

From what former FBI Director James Comey has told the public, the FBI and the Department of Justice are apparently on the side of the Constitution. Speaking not for the political appointees, but the men and women in the trenches of the Bureau and DOJ, he swears they will follow the word and spirit of the law.

Say what you will about whether we can believe him. I, for one, found him credible and willing to defend that, regardless of whether he made mistakes, he made them honestly and with a clear sense of right and wrong when it came to defending the integrity of the Bureau and the Department of Justice.

I have chosen to take him at his word, and to find hope in his words. If the Department of Justice is firmly on the side of the Constitution (regardless of the standpoints of its Secretary and other political appointees), then President Trump’s only recourse on the day of his reckoning will be to the senior officers of his military.

And we need to know — publicly — where they stand.