Tag Archives: US Congress

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)

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.

How Many Enemies Can Trump Make and Survive?

12 Apr 2018 By in The Republicans Tags: , , , 1 Comment

The list of powerful figures Trump has alienated, injured, and offended is growing.  Paradoxically, many of them are members of his own, rather than the opposing, party.  How many such enemies can Trump make and survive?

For more than a year, the GOP establishment has presented a “business-as-usual” facade.  Having tolerated the rise of candidate Trump, who vowed to wage war against the Washington establishment, leading Republicans have mainly tried to make lemonade out of lemons, sucking up to President Trump once he was installed.  House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prostituted themselves, claiming that the president and the GOP-controlled Congress shared the same values and political agenda.  Papering over their differences with Trump for the sake of personal and political gain, they collaborated instead of organizing a principled opposition to him on Capitol Hill.

Individually, some Republicans have spoken out against Trump: Jeff Flake, John McCain, Bob Corker, and Lindsay Graham come to mind.  Their criticisms, though brave, fall short of organized opposition.  As for Trumps’ former rivals for the presidential nomination—remember the legion of GOP candidates that included congressman Rand Paul and Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz?—: despite Trump’s shameful treatment of them, these “leaders” have blended into the woodwork of the Capitol, as if to avoid further personal injury.  Republicans on the Hill who have followed the path of least resistance to Trump will go down in history as spineless, feckless cowards.

Belatedly, Republicans are beginning to reckon the costs of this unbecoming position.  Speaker Paul Ryan’s abrupt decision to leave Congress with no plan other than to spend time with his three teenage children in Janesville, Wisconsin, smacks of the political wilderness.  He joins some 36 House Republicans and 3 Senate Republicans fleeing the Hill.  The Republicans have not seen this level of quitting, according to Frontline, since World War II.

The question is, what will become of the free-floating political capital that these phalanxes of displaced and disaffected Republicans embody?  How long will it be before Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Rex Tillerson, Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan, and their ilk find a new party model, or a new means of influencing a politics grown ever more chaotic and uncertain?   How long will it be before moderates of all stripes realize that it is very much in their interests to unite?  The GOP is becoming a Trump casualty.  Will its survivors stand against their destroyer now?

Dislodging the President

22 Jan 2018 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

US map showing partisan voting inclinations by county.

Donald Trump will remain in the presidency until we dislodge him.  No matter how many millions of citizens want him gone, the means of achieving this goal before 2020 are narrow and few, and most depend on the inclination of other major government officials.  In this review of the options, I conclude that Donald Trump is unlikely to be removed from office until his opponents become better organized and gain control of both the House and Senate.

Click here for the audio version.

1. Impeaching the president

Whether or not there are grounds for impeaching President Trump, impeachment depends on Congress’s will.  As the US House website puts it: “The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power to impeach an official, and it makes the Senate the sole court for impeachment trials.”  Whereas initially I imagined that an anti-Trump coalition might emerge among Capitol Hill Republicans, that hope has died.  A few Republican senators have criticized the president, but their opposition remains personal, episodic, isolated.  Recent events show that Republicans have decided to collaborate with Trump rather than try to get rid of him.  Were Congress composed differently, it would be another story.  For now, though, Democratic efforts to have Trump impeached or censured are pointless, for the simple reason that Democrats are in the minority.

2. The special prosecutor

Will the investigations of special prosecutor Robert Mueller—the so-called “Russia probe”—yield information sufficient to remove Trump from office?  If Trump were himself a tool of the Russian government, I believe he would have persisted in trying to fire Mueller or constrain the investigation.*  Trump has (reluctantly) foregone this route, even though his inaction leaves open the possibility that Mueller will eventually press criminal charges against Trump’s children.

Information already made public shows how aggressively agents of the Russian government pursued contacts with members of Trump’s inner circle, testing how many ways they could succeed in corrupting and compromising Trump’s relatives, associates, and administration, and, with them, the American political system.  While the Russians have reason to be satisfied with the success of their audacious experiment, the evidence so far available to the public falls short of establishing that Trump was personally involved.

Were Mueller to bring out evidence that Trump colluded with or was compromised by the Russians, what would happen?  Such evidence could compel the House to impeach, but, as long as Trump is a sitting president, he is largely immune from being charged with a crime.  According to Cass Sunstein, writing in Bloomberg News, a sitting president can only be charged with crimes committed prior to taking his office or unrelated to his presidential role.  In the unlikely event of Trump’s being impeached and convicted, only after being removed from office would he face trial for criminal wrongdoing.  And never has a special prosecution produced such spectacular results.

Impeachment is a serious drag on a presidency, but it’s a clumsy tool, in that Congress has never come to the point of kicking a president out.  In the case of Watergate, Nixon preempted the process by resigning when the threat of impeachment loomed.  Kenneth Starr’s lengthy special investigation prompted Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but ultimately the Senate acquitted Clinton, leaving him to serve out his second term.  Because impeachment is a political but not a criminal proceeding, its outcome is highly discretionary and dependent on political factors.  The only other president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson back in 1868; the Senate acquitted him, too.

3. The 25th Amendment

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare a president unable to perform his duties, whereupon the vice president shall assume the president’s role.  Dissatisfaction with Trump has led to increased discussion of the 25th Amendment, as if it were designed to remedy a president’s poor judgment or incompetence.  Michael Wolff, in promoting his sensational new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, has encouraged this misconception by claiming that the 25th Amendment is under discussion in the West Wing “all the time.”  A quick read of the amendment establishes that it applies only to fairly extreme conditions of physical incapacity, for it allows the President to reverse its effects by notifying leaders of Congress that he is again able to discharge his duties.  Last week, the president’s first official physical exam concluded with Dr. Ronny L. Johnson, the physician in charge, proclaiming the 71-year-old Trump to be in “excellent health.”  So wake up, America: unless the President is physically incapacitated, the 25th Amendment won’t be invoked.

4. Shaming the president

The president’s extraordinary behavior following the publication of Wolff’s blistering expose shows his sensitivity to embarrassment of a certain kind.  Yes, Trump has a tough skin, but he hates it when people he respects, whose approval he craves, look down on him.  He hates being confronted with evidence that he is anathema to others who are powerful and celebrated.  Trump looks down on reporters and many of his political rivals, but he is sensitive to criticism that leaves him feeling one-down.  Leading activists have yet to zero in on what symbols can be used to dog Trump and effectively heighten his sense of shame.  Protests against Trump should be orchestrated around the goal of making the president miserable.  Could a strategy of social shaming drive him from office?  It might, if it eats away at his sense of self and robs him of the pleasure he derives from his job.  Nixon resigned from office mainly because he had been disgraced.  The stigma was a punishment that never went away.

5. Winning back Congressional majorities in 2018

The uncertainty of these options suggests how important it is that Trump’s opponents direct their all toward ousting Trump’s Republican collaborators from the US House and Senate.  The GOP is in a weak and troubled condition, and Republicans in Congress, still loyal to their party, have concluded with good reason that if they do not collaborate with the mercurial Trump, their party will fail.  Their numerical supremacy can’t palliate the ideological fissures and Faustian compromises eroding their party’s integrity.  As Democrats lay plans to defeat incumbent Republicans in November, they should remember the millions of moderate Republicans and independents who are looking for a new reason to go to the polls.  Whereas a tilt to the left will not strengthen the Democrats’ alarmingly weak share of political power, with a fresh, moderate ideology, the party could attract thousands of new voters and prevail.

Image: The map by SpeedMcCool from Wikimedia Commons
shows party leanings by congressional district,
using Cook Partisan Voting Index scores for the (current) 115th Congress.

* This sentence, the subject of discussion in the comments section, has been modified from its original version.

A Noteworthy Day in Politics

12 Jan 2018 By in Governing Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Tuesday, January 9, was a noteworthy day in politics, particularly if viewed with the question of Trump’s re-electability in mind.  On three different fronts, events cautioned against writing off or underestimating the president, whose manners and morals Americans rightly revile.  In other eras, the president’s lack of virtue would have posed an insuperable obstacle to his attaining office, but this is a more easy-going time, when Americans temporize more and cut others more slack when it comes to low and disreputable behavior.  Indeed, the cynicism that has prompted many formerly disapproving GOP party stalwarts to support and collaborate with Trump, has given him a boost and a shot at political viability, that’s disturbing.  That Trump’s leading detractors within the GOP would be so willing to make common cause with him would have been difficult to foresee just one year ago.  Yet this cynicism is the cornerstone on which the GOP establishment will build its Trump-era achievements.

Click here for the audio version.

1. The market is booming

The Democrats have every reason to be afraid.  For what if, despite Mr. Trump’s bigotry and ineptitude, his White House ends up being associated with prosperity and peace?  Since his inauguration, the stock market has climbed.  On Tuesday, stock indexes again closed at or near all-time highs.  The major indices rose about 20 percent in 2017, meaning that everyone with money invested in the market is significantly richer than when Mr. Trump took office just one year ago.

Trump has taken other actions on the economic front that will become “credits” for him if “good times” continue.  He opted for continuity and moderation at the Fed in choosing Jerome Powell to succeed outgoing Fed chair Janet Yellin.  Trump can also take credit for the poorly crafted “tax reform” bill that Congress has passed, which will lower taxes for many Americans, at least through the next election cycle, after which many of the benefits will expire.  (Note the cynicism again.)

2. Inter-Korean talks

Tuesday brought news of a positive break in the tense situation on the Korean Peninsula.  With little fanfare, representatives of North and South Korea met face-to-face and agreed that North Korea would participate in the Winter Olympic Games, which will open in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on February 8.  In the US, the evening news aired startling footage of delegations from the two sides, shaking hands and grinning after their meeting in the Demilitarized Zone.  It was the first such meeting since late 2015, breaking up a dynamic of deterioration that North Korea’s worrisome advances in proto-nuclear bomb testing had brought on.

Though North Korea’s desire to participate in the Olympics mainly prompted the meeting, it was symbolically and diplomatically important, resulting in “gains” for the Koreas and the Trump administration.  The sudden thaw in relations is a win for North Korea, in that it will be spared the humiliation and “invisibility” of being excluded from the international games (an exclusion that Russia, for example, will be suffering).  Inclusion is meaningful to all Koreans as a symbolic token of unification. It also allows the North to share in the gratification and global recognition that comes from South Korea’s hosting the games.  The South’s concession gives credence to the prospect of better North-South relations, which its new president, Moon Jae-in, has promised.

Amid the happy buzz of this inter-Korean detente, whom did President Moon credit but Donald J. Trump?  Moon connected the breakthrough to Trump’s blunt promise to wipe the North Korean regime off the face of the earth should it attempt a nuclear strike on the US or its allies.  For the past several months, Trump has engaged in nuclear brinkmanship.  Now, though, he can argue that it’s paid off.

3.  Cuing Congress on immigration reform

Above all, Tuesday’s unusual meeting on immigration reform, which brought Congressional leaders of both parties together at the White House, illustrates what makes the president so politically dangerous.  This meeting, which was novel in its conception and effects, was the lead story in a news-heavy day.  What made the meeting novel was that Trump instigated bipartisan discussion of the immigration issue right there on the spot.  Pledging to “take the heat” and sign whatever immigration reform bill Congress might come up with, he prompted a nearly one-hour discussion between Democrats and Republicans, who sparred back and forth as the television cameras rolled.  At the end of the meeting, participants emerged with consensus on the four broad topics that an acceptable bill must treat.  Mr. Trump looked presidential, in that he gave direction to his party and the legislature, while reminding the Congress that working out the details of legislation was its Constitutional role, not his.

Video of the event showed Republicans and Democrats in the same room, publicly and spontaneously working out a point of policy: just what is supposed to happen routinely in the House and Senate chambers, but which in fact has not happened there in decades.  The publicity that used to surround such spontaneous exchanges is the very thing that once gave serving in the US Congress such enormous prestige.  One can only hope that the ballyhoo surrounding Tuesday’s activities will inspire senators and representatives to revive their historic tradition of open and authentic deliberation.

Word has leaked out that, in the unrecorded portion of this meeting, Trump used vulgar language to demonize immigrants from Haiti and African countries.  The fact that Trump is both immoral and a nimble politician is precisely what his opponents must reckon with more aggressively.  He is inept, unacceptable, and embarrassing; he is also intent on transforming American trade and foreign policy and restoring American prosperity.  Trump’s opponents mustn’t be satisfied with denouncing his latest outrage: they must devote their attention to figuring out how to defeat this thick-skinned monster and his party at the polls.  Trump is a change-agent without a heart, and he will continue to hold power and rack up “successes” until those who oppose him figure out how to chip away at his base by offering viable alternative policies.