Category Archives: Politics

Impeach Trump, an Enemy of the Constitution

9 Oct 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , 20 Comments

Dear Friends,

Impeaching President Trump is a patriotic necessity, one that every American regardless of party should support.  As Trump’s behavior becomes ever more brazen and erratic, every American needs to voice support for the impeachment process per se and do everything possible to encourage Republican lawmakers to join in removing Trump from office quickly.  I say this without having any axe to grind against the President or the GOP.  Unless the political class unites around the goal of removing him from office, our nation will have no future and the GOP itself will wither and die.

It’s clear from the papers that President Trump sought to coerce the Ukrainian government to come up with dirt that would harm a political opponent while helping the president’s own election chances.  Some people, like Senator Rob Portman, have temporized, saying that the president’s action was unwise but not impeachable.  Portman is wrong because if the President’s behavior is allowed, our entire election system will become a farce.  It will become a farce simply by allowing the President to continue on this way throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.  Where does his conduct leave every other candidate, Democrat or Republican, who runs for office but plays by the rules?  His lawless behavior is an affront to everyone else who has legitimately won an elective post.  Publicly inviting foreign governments to meddle in our affairs, as Trump has done, demonstrates a resolve to defy–rather than defend–our written and living Constitution.

Personally, I am outraged at the development of a corrupt set of transnational relations that a sitting president is hoping will lessen his dependence on American voters.  The president bets that he can hold on to power by conjuring up a climate of public opinion that degrades every other public figure and undermines confidence in our once-efficacious and illustrious political system.  The damage that he is inflicting on his own party, on the nation, and on blameless public servants is mounting daily.  If the American public cries out loudly for impeachment, Republicans will listen.

No one but former Senator Jeff Flake has the guts to admit how many enemies Trump has within his own party.  (The Arizona Republican, speaking to USA Today last month, estimated that 35 GOP senators would vote to remove Trump if the vote were private.)  Think of all the honorable people Trump has dismissed and humiliated, the Tillersons and McMasters of the world.  Where are they now?  If I were Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or Marco Rubio, I’d be working furiously behind the scenes to dump Donald Trump and expel him from the Republican Party.  If the Senate GOP hangs with Trump, the senators will go down in history as the group that destroyed our nation through inactivity.  If, though, they turn against Trump, the GOP will save the nation from a very bad man, and the party’s prospects will brighten again.

I am not a firebrand.  Frankly, I wish this whole terrifying mess Trump is causing would go away.  But he really is turning into a political Lucifer, destroying the “natural order” of the government and aspiring to a kind of power at odds with what the Constitution envisioned.  This morning the Times reports his decision to spurn cooperation with the House impeachment inquiry, branding it “illegitimate” and “partisan,” whereas if he has done nothing wrong one would think he would be eager to clear his name.  Congress definitely has the right to gather information prior to charging Trump with articles of impeachment, and no amount of bluster will take that right away.

Again, I entreat every patriot to get behind impeachment as loudly as possible and to urge the House and Senate to see it through. Perhaps massive pro-impeachment rallies are the way to go.

RELATED ARTICLES:
George Will, “The Spiraling President Adds Self-Impeachment To His Repertory” (10 Oct 2019)

Why The Parties Don’t Die

20 Jul 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , 1 Comment
  1. They are mature bureaucracies.
  2. Incumbency: the desire of those in power to remain in power.
  3. Monied interests support and reinforce the existing structure.
  4. The absence of good alternatives (no viable insurgent parties that look like winners).
  5. At the state level, hostile conditions, along with sheer lassitude, prevent new parties from forming.
  6. The specialized intellectuals (editors, ideologues, strategists) needed to create new parties have grown up with the existing parties and are loathe to abandon them.  Professional loyalty to party interests perpetuates their power.
  7. Candidates know it’s easier to get votes through one of the two major parties: this is what Trump and Sanders both discovered.  So grass-roots/breakaway movements that might formerly have chosen to build something new from the ground up are instead aspiring to rehab the old parties from within.  Both major parties are living off of the parasitic energy of actors who are cannibalizing them (e.g., the Tea Party, the current-day progressives).
  8. Parties used to coalesce around outstanding individuals and their ideas (e.g. Jacksonian democracy; “radical Republicans”) but this customary way of organizing politics, which was risky and instinctive, has been superseded by methods that are bureaucratic and “scientific.”  Dependence on a bureaucratic establishment tends to become a substitute for reliance on the public will.  The monolithic character of the Republican and Democratic establishments and their tendency to thwart political innovation has become an open target of frustration and rage on both the right and left (embodied in Trump and Ocasio-Cortez).
  9. The old parties, burdensome though they are, stabilize national politics.  Americans are accustomed to the order and the limited choices they provide.  So we resist acknowledging that we should abandon these parties.  The parties no longer harmonize sentiment: they no longer stand for a single set of non-negotiable goals.  Ideologically, both parties are fractured.  Their tents are so big, what they stand for is no longer clear to the people.  They struggle to exert discipline over their supposed standard-bearers.  Iconoclasts overwhelm them.  Nonetheless, they live on because politics without these parties would open up new realms of possibility, giving American both more to hope for—and more to fear.

Mr Mueller and the Central Crime

31 May 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Period drawing of puppet-master (putin) and his puppet characters (the Trumps)

And I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments: That there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.

Such were the parting words of special prosecutor Robert Mueller, as he announced the end of the so-called Russia investigation.  Since the bulk of his team’s report was released to the press and public on April 18th, its central allegation regarding Russia’s infiltration of American media and politics has attracted much less attention than the unsatisfyingly big questions Mueller’s investigation leaves.  “What did Trump have to do with it?” and “Can’t Congress impeach him?” continue to be uppermost in many American minds.

Will Democrats raise their sights and train them on protecting American politics and media from foreign infiltration?  Will they accept the paradoxical truth that, because impeachment is politically impossible, they must channel all their energies into having a “clean” election in 2020 and defeating Trump unequivocally at the polls?

As if Trump were the only president fishy shenanigans aided!  In the end, his election resulted from an ordinary electoral majority, notwithstanding all the dubious preliminaries.  This distinguishes his victory from other, more dubious outcomes such as Bush v. Gore (2000), Hayes v. Tilden (1876), and Adams v. Jackson (1824).  In those cases, the winners gained office only after strenuous post-election day maneuvering.  Given the power of the presidential office, every flaw and vulnerability in our manner of presidential selection should be boosted to the top of our political agenda and eliminated.

Mr Mueller’s remarks were peppered with finality.  Calling the report that bears his name “his testimony,” he expressed unwillingness to comment further on matters involved in the investigation, declaring flatly, “we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president.”  No hypotheticals.  For those looking to prove that President Trump is a criminal, no further help can be expected from Mr. Mueller.  What hope is there that American officials will instead turn their attention to the central crime he found?

I . . . close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments: That there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.

 

♦

A Legitimately Elected President

26 Mar 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama, and Jill Biden among dignitaries on inauguration dias.
The conclusion of the Mueller investigation presents leading Democrats with a fateful choice: whether to continue digging into the past in hopes of hobbling or delegitimizing Trump’s presidency, or to concentrate on the present and the future, when all their ingenuity will be needed to beat Trump and deny him a second term.

Though the latter would be better for the party and nation, turning away from the special investigation requires fortitude.  The Mueller report hasn’t been made public, and the pundits and pols who are against Trump aren’t satisfied with Attorney General William Barr’s disclosures and conclusions.  The Democrats want more information.  This desire, as reasonable as it is, distinguishes them from the mass of American citizens who are really tired of this subtle affair and who are dying for evidence that the government is still capable of . . . . GOVERNING.

If the Democrats want someone new in the White House in 2020, they need to persuade voters that their nominee and their vision will be better for the nation than what Trump offers.  Yet they are so far from presenting this impression that one can scarcely imagine their unifying around a tenable candidate and winning.

Democrats are procrastinating.  They are shirking the hard work that follows from acknowledging that Trump won office legitimately.  He enjoys an authority that is foolish to argue with: In 2016, he understood the rules of the electoral game and exploited them more effectively than did Hillary Clinton.  He won the electoral votes he needed by persuading enough citizens to go to the polls and vote for him in key states.  Two years later, most of the president’s opponents have yet to reckon with this reality, even though any political strategy leading to Trump’s defeat must be designed with this geography in mind.  To defeat Trump, Democrats must peel away moderate and independent voters in states fed up with stale Democratic memes.  The Dems face an uphill battle, even with teamwork, ideological innovation, and the right nominee.

And where is Democratic rage when it comes to the real bogeyman, Russia–the real villain who prejudiced American voters against Hillary by waging a campaign of misinformation, who smeared her and deployed assets to promote Trump, a candidate who, for various reasons, Russia wanted instead?  What is Congress doing to ensure that foreign nations don’t infiltrate and corrupt American political discourse in the future?

While real danger looms over American democracy, one wonders whether the Democrats will ever look up from their game of Clue and do something.

Image: Screen shot of leading Democrats attending Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.
© 2019 American Inguiry

Senator Flake

18 Feb 2019 By in Politics, The Trump Years Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

The former Senator from Arizona speaking at the Union League Club of Chicago's George Washington's Birthday Celebration.
Over the weekend, I went to hear Senator Jeff Flake at the Union League Club. Every February, the club hosts a big dinner to celebrate George Washington’s birthday and invites a guest speaker. This year, Jeff Flake of Arizona spoke. This was the 131st first year the dinner was held.

I believe that whenever one has a chance to see a major public figure, one should take the opportunity.   Flake has just left the Senate after one term but he is definitely presidential material, and I will be surprised if he fails to run for president one day. He faces one major impediment to his ambition, however: at the moment he is very nearly a man without a party.

Flake comes across as a very poised, articulate, and thoughtful conservative. He describes himself as having fallen in love with politics at an early age. He served twelve years in the House of Representatives prior to his elevation to the Senate. Then along came Trump, the game changer who has cast Flake into a sea of difficulty.  Flake is one of the few Republicans in Congress to have broken openly with the president instead of going along with him in a sheepish and cowardly way.

Most Republican senators have tried to “find common ground” with the president as though doing so does not compromise their dignity. They have chosen to collaborate with him, even though it cheapens them by association. Trump treats the Senate in a high-handed and condescending manner. The Republican-led Senate has permitted itself to be humiliated. Republican senators endure Trump for the sake of party domination.

In the rare cases when the Republican majority finds that it cannot comply with Trump, its opposition to the president is tacit, as was true last week when Trump was shut out of the budget negotiations and told afterward that he must accept the negotiated deal. By and large, Republican senators have watched silently, however, as Trump has destroyed the soul of the “Grand Old Party.” It’s a peculiar situation, because it’s not clear whether most leading Republicans genuinely endorse Trump’s ideas. What they see is that Trump is charismatic and that his charisma is pumping up Republican power. Perhaps they believe they can outlast Trump, then return to what they were before.

Jeff Flake has no such illusions. He cannot stand with a president whose followers chant, “Lock her up.” During Flake’s tenure in Congress, he witnessed the gradual erosion of comity on Capitol Hill. When he began, it was still the custom of senators and representatives to move their families to Washington. Political differences tended to evaporate when members on either side of the aisle knew one another’s children by name. On weekends, representatives worshipped together and watched their kids play sports, developing friendships that softened the edges of partisan conflict.

That changed, Flake recalled, with Newt Gingrich’s speakership.  Gingrich told House Republicans to leave their families at home, because, on the weekends, he expected them to be back in their districts campaigning. As a result, the US now has “a commuter Congress,” with members flying in to work a few days a week.

Reluctant to treat Democrats as “the enemy” and unwilling to stand with the president, Flake has learned that Republicans in his state increasingly demand this very thing. Whereas “the economy” or “jobs” used to top the list of Republican voters’ concerns, “Where do you stand on Trump?” has displaced them, according to recent polls. Out of sync with both his base and GOP leadership, Flake saw re-election was futile.  He left the Senate last month.  In retirement, he seems to have embraced the philosophy of the first president we had gathered to honor. For, as that great man once observed,

If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The rest is in the hands of God.