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The New York Slime is outraged -- positively outraged -- that the Senate has failed its constitutional duty by refusing to call witnesses in the “trial” of President Trump, thereby insuring his acquittal on the impeachment charges. Fie! Ne'er more vile a thing.... and blah, blah, blah. The inevitable acquittal will serve only to bring a second disgorging of more blah, blah, blah.
Was there any doubt that a Republican controlled Senate would stonewall the trial or -- if it came to that -- acquit? Not a scintilla of doubt.
As if taken by shock and surprise, the Slime goes on to rant: “the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal — and stupid — power politics.”
But what of the House? Was it any less “power politics” to bring charges that were foreseeably certain to fail? What then was the point if not to score stupid political points in an election year?
The Demorats and the Slime refuse to grasp the very simple fact that Constitution sets a very high bar for the removal of a president. This bar has nothing to do with the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” -- a semantic issue on which too much blather has been expended. The bar is set by the simple and positive fact that, in order to convict, a vote of two thirds of Senate present is required. (Art. 1, § 3 ¶ 6-7.) That is the equivalent of what is required to table an amendment to the Constitution.
One has to return to 1789 to grasp the significance of this threshold. Then, as now, the House represented the people. The Senate, however, represented the States as such and as sovereign entities. Senators were not elected by, and did not represent, the people in the various states. That would be a ridiculous duplication of what was already provided for by the House of Representatives. No -- the Senate was, in effect, a diplomatic council of legates from the States. More to the point, it was the equivalent of a House of Lords, representing various estate and incorporated interests. It was understood by the Founders that each State comprised certain geographical-economic interests and that each state would be ruled by oligarchies of leading and propertied men. The Senate represented not people but clusters of economic interests. Thus to require a two-thirds vote on anything was to require a very high degree of political consensus on the issue in question. Not unanimity; but certainly more than a partisan plurality. A consensus that included a majority of citizens and a super majority of all political-economic interests in the land.
The reason for such a high bar was that removing a president had a revolutionary character akin to deposing a monarch. The president, of course, is not a king but neither is he a mere minister. The powers the Framers endowed him with fit to a “T” Edward Gibbon's definition of a monarchy -- a definition published in 1776. The obvious difference is that the president is (1) elected for (2) a short term of years. Another difference, which Hamilton points out, is that the president can be impeached whereas the removal of a monarch requires the “crisis of a revolution.” But it is that very distinction which points to the nature of impeachment. It is not merely a forfeiture of office for malfeasance; it is an act which, at the very least, rattles the settled and regular order of the state, which presuposes a non-interruption of its fundamental processes. The president was elected by a majority of the franchise plus two thirds of the state electors; he should be deposed by no less an equivalent process.
Did such a consensus exist on whether Trump should be removed for office? The Democrats might have been united in heart, mind and desire but -- oh surprise -- the Democrats are not the country. In fact by the looks of how they have managed to loose governorships and legislatures they are far less than the country. The same sense of petulant entitlement that afflicted Hillary Clinton appears to have infected the Democrat Party. No, Scarlett, you don't get what you want because you want it. Or were the Democrats simply pursuing “base...and stupid power politics”?
In law, substance and process go hand in hand. One never gets to the merits of a criminal's case without meeting a procedural threshold, one of the most important of which is the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts. Because they never get to trial, the public seldom reads about all those cases which a prosecutor choses not to bring because he knows (for whatever reason) that he will not be able to convince 12 jurors of the defendant's guilt. A prosecutor who brought a case knowing it could not be won would be guilty of using his office for no other purpose than to vex and harass.
The New York Slime was intent to analogize the situation to that of a criminal trial. Witnesses should be called! The Republicans refused! “Faced with credible evidence that a president was abusing his powers, .... the Senate abandon[ed] its role as the ultimate guard against a dangerous president.”
“Faced with credible evidence” is precisely the situation that daily faces a prosecutor who must decide whether or not to pursue the case against an arguably dangerous person. That is a necessary condition for prosecution, but under our system it is not a sufficient one. It could never have been in doubt that votes did not exist to convict Trump in the Senate. With that point in mind it can only be concluded that the entire charade was nothing but stupid power politics aimed at vexing the president and scoring demagogic points.
What is colossally stupid is that there are no demagogic points to be scored. Trump's base is unmovable and impervious. The progressive working class wing of the Demorat party has more immediate and substantial things on their minds. The only groundswell is the one in the brains of media pundits in Le Petit Trianon assembled. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff might as well have paraded down the Mall, hand in hand, under a sign reading: WE ARE OUT OF TOUCH. Brioche anyone?
But just for the hell of it let us reach the merits of the case against Trump.
According to the Slime, Trump “was abusing” his powers. That sounds terrible. But labels are facile. How is Trump abusing his power? In what way is he dangerous? Saith the Slime,
"The core of the impeachment case against Mr. Trump: his extortion of Ukraine by explicitly conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid on the announcement of investigations into his political rival."
So... he leaned on a clown turned president in an effort to dig up dirt on a possible opponent in the upcoming president. This undermines the Republic? Really? Not only is digging up dirt on rivals as old as democracy itself, it is an essential element of all politics. Not only is extorting a foreign country an essential element of all diplomacy, it is one that the United States has excelled at perhaps more than any other in the past 200 years. Do the self-infatuated pundits of the Slime really believe this garbage? No. Their duplicitous unbelief is proved by the way they try to metamorphose the “extortion” of the Ukraine into a “vital national security issue.”
This is how the theory goes. The stability and defence of the Ukraine is a vital national security interest to the United States. By threatening to withhold military aid, Trump was, playing fast and loose with the country's national security.
The first defect with this line of reasoning is that the whole point of any blackmail threat is the expectation that it will not have to be carried out. The kidnapper does not want to kill the daughter; he want's the ransom and, at the end of the day, he doesn't have to kill his hostage. It's a nasty form of gamesmanship, but until the murder has actually been committed that is all it is. Because military aid was never withheld from the Ukraine for more than 48 or so hours, it simply cannot be argued that Trump prejudiced the national security of the United States. We are left with “fast and loose.”
Beneath all of this is the assumed premise that the Ukraine is some kind of cornerstone to America's national security. Since when? Never, in the 200 plus years of the Republic has the Ukraine ever been regarded as vital to American interests. Panama was far more vital. It was always recognized that if anything the Ukraine fell in Russia's sphere of influence. Never, at least, until 2000 when the Neocons espoused the doctrine of “pushing America's security perimeter eastward.” (Rebuidling America's Defences , P.N.A.C., Sept.2000.) Neocon doctrine is nothing other than the Terminal Dementia of empire, but the notion was that the United States had not only to contain Russia but to constrain her. “To push her back beyond the Urals” as Hitler would have put it. Yes, dear reader, this is what the Neocons area about. But it is only under that demented Neocon premise that the Ukraine becomes a “vital piece” of America's movable security structure.
What is truly beyond belief is that the Demorats and the Slime should espouse a premise that was rejected by one of its chief architects. Before he died, Zbignew Brezinski recanted his own theory of hedging in and breaking up the "Russian Empire." This policy, he admitted, was simply wrongheaded. If tightening a noose around Russia is wrongheaded then Ukraine is simply not in the vital interests of the United States.
Yet its precisely on this wrongheadedness that the entire case of impeachment hangs. It is stupid beyond belief. The average American might never have heard of Brezinski's The Grand Chessboard but they know in the intuitive way that common people know things that Ukraine means nothing to us. We can undermine its elected government with the help of neo nazis, we can “stand by it” by funding the fascist Azov Brigade, we can use it to annoy and tweak Russia or to make money from IMF loans... but none of this is in the vital national security interests of the United States.
The case against Trump simply fails to rise to even a serious level much less to cause for institutionalized revolt.
This is not to say that Trump is not a threat to democracy, to what is called civil society and to the planet. But if that is the case to be made, the Democrats have failed to make it. Nor is it clear that they can make it given that the worst of Trump's policies have always been drawn behind a tissue of legality. The way to run him out of town is the way the Constitution provides: by not renewing his contract at the end of his term. But that is not the way the Demorats have chosen and they have not chosen it because the DNC is nothing more than the alter-ego of a resentful, vituperative, narcissistic bitch.
©wcg 2020
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