It becomes hard to have a democracy if one party – the GOP – no longer feels even the slightest obligation to make real arguments, and has decided there is no penalty for such bottomless bad faith.
-Greg Sargent
Well, as of the last day of January 2020, Donald Trump may not officially be a king, but by refusing to allow witness testimony at his impeachment trial, Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell has confirmed the new name of Trump’s Party: The Banana Republicans.
“No! This isn’t a Banana Republic! It’s just a system where one party has all the power, one party enforces the election rules, one party makes all decisions, one party can break all the rules they insist everyone else follow, and the Leader of that party is a law unto himself because his cronies will let him get away with anything!
“TOTALLY NOT the same thing!”
I mean, we already knew given the deliberately high standard for removing an impeached official, and the party-line consensus, that you weren’t actually going to have a removal, but they could have at least TRIED not to make it look like such a complete setup. As it is, The Party of Trump went in the total opposite direction, doing everything it could to send the message, “we can do whatever the fuck we want, and you can’t do shit about it.”
(Not that any true Republican would ever sully the air with such crude, un-Christian language.)
First, in the arguments phase, Trump’s mostly Republican staff pool of lawyers came to say in so many words, he didn’t do it, if he did do it, you can’t prove it (because we wouldn’t provide evidence as required by law) and even if you can prove it, so what, he’s the president. But as in so many cases, it took a real leftist to provide a foundation for right-wing corruption and rescue them from their own lack of imagination. That liberal being Alan Dershowitz, famed defense attorney and Trump’s fellow traveler in the Jeffrey Epstein Frequent Flyer Club. Of all Trump’s defenders, Dershowitz made the most buzz by declaring in front of witnesses Wednesday that “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” After getting his ass handed to him by public commentary, Dershowitz complained that he was misinterpreted, saying on Thursday, “They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything. I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest.”
Those two quotes are put close together. Saying “if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything” is NOT in any way like the statement “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment”?
Sorry, Alan, but the only reason your remarks were “misinterpreted” is that they were so irresponsibly broad that they could be interpreted any way you want.
The presumption of innocence in common law already exists. There is already an institutional respect for the president’s prerogatives. But Dershowitz goes out of his way to go beyond these presumptions and actively assert that the president is the standard of judgment, and thus in his trial, the defendant is one who sets the standard of judgment. And it’s all justified by the liberals’ magic phrase, “the public interest.” As long as YOU can set the standard for what consitutes the public interest, you can literally do anything you want, because it’s “in the public interest.”
Years – or maybe weeks – from now,
every political prisoner, everybody who’s lost their job because of
the president, everyone who’s ever had their lives ruined by the
political campaign of the ruling party, can look up and give thanks
and praise to America’s great legal mind, Alan Dershowitz- that great
left-wing defender of free speech and civil rights, and sole author
of the US Constitution, version 2.0. A document that has one Article,
one section, one paragraph: “Donald Trump can do anything he
wants, cause he’s the President and you’re not. The End.”
As
in, The End of the Republic.
Of course, one expects this sort of relativism and chicanery from Dershowitz, but when Ken Starr is on the same legal team as Alan Dershowitz, “conservatives” really need to take stock of where they are and how they got there.
It actually went downhill from there, as during the rest of the senatorial question phase, the Trump defense team and their amen corner in the Senate acted as though “BURISMA” was a magic word that would strike them with lightning and give them superpowers.
Bringing up Hunter and Joe Biden – or Rand Paul’s stunt of asking Justice Roberts to name the whistleblower (oh, by the way, Fuck You, Rand Paul) – were attempts to do the same thing as the Ukraine pressure campaign – smear Donald Trump’s assumed general election opponent, and in the process smear and intimidate anybody who gets in the way. Well, if Hunter Biden, who was never a Trump employee, is relevant to this case because of what he did in Ukraine during the Obama Administration, then former Trump employee Paul Manafort is relevant to this case because of what he did in the Ukraine during the Obama Administration. After all, that’s a large part of why he’s in prison himself and Hunter Biden is not. As much love as Adam Schiff gets, he really should have pointed that out.
What this behavior demonstrated above all else is that Republicans are not disinterested public servants or even political associates of Trump. They are active co-conspirators in a criminal act.
The “silver lining” in this is that there is no pretending about that anymore. There is no pretending that Republicans care about anything other than their Leader and their donor class. They don’t care about the Constitution and they sure as hell don’t care about the people who vote for them.
And this was demonstrated by the start of the endgame. Late Thursday toward midnight Friday, the elder-statesman Senator Lamar Alexander (BR.-Tennessee) stated on his position on the modern world’s preferred medium of intellectual discourse: Twitter. In a 15-post tweetstorm, Alexander went over the facts: “It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation.” “There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.” “There is no need for more evidence to prove that the president asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter; he said this on television on October 3, 2019, and during his July 25, 2019, telephone call with the president of Ukraine.” And yet, in the same paragraph where he said, “I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, ” Alexander continued, “but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the U.S. Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense.”
It’s totally cowardly, of course, but at least it’s honest. None of this smarmy defense of “my sweet little boy could never ever ever do anything wrong.” It’s flat-out: We don’t NEED more evidence because the case is already proven. We’re just not going to acknowledge it.
And notice we go back to that old bit, “he did it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.” I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you, but it was the same defense that Democrats in the Senate made for Bill Clinton in 1998. I know how much Republicans hate the Clintons, but apparently they decided the only way to beat them was to become them.
And to continue with the candy-ass: “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did.”
If “conservatives” are going to stamp down any dissent with “It’s a Republic, not a Democracy!” it begs the question: What is the point of a representative republic if the representatives are not going to vote their own minds? If you’re going to take the choice away from the public but then when called upon to decide, you say, “let the voters decide” – well, why do we NEED you?
“I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday. “
Oh, don’t worry, Lamar.
We will.