Can Democracy Survive the Impeachment Debacle

In January 2016, candidate Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok?”  The President delivered on his boast last week when all but one of the fifty-three Republicans in the Senate voted against removing him from office, thus exonerating him from the attempt to bribe a foreign government into supporting his 2020 election.  Those Republicans also cleared him of obstructing Congress, even though he had refused all documents and prohibited his subordinates from testifying before the constitutionally-mandated impeachment process.

Trump lawyers had few arguments.  It was quite clear he did what he was accused of.  Furthermore, it should be obvious that a presidential attempt to coerce another government into acting against the president's enemy requires removal from office.

His “exoneration” should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the hearings.  Both sides made it abundantly clear that the vote would be along party lines.  What might surprise us is the willingness of the Republicans in the Senate to flout the Constitution so brazenly. 

Flawed as it is, the Constitution is all we have as a founding document.  It is the basis of American law.  We change it with amendments only with the utmost care and deliberation through a time-consuming process that involves the entire country.  The Republican Party has changed it with a fifty-two-person vote, pre-determined along partisan lines.

Given the existential threat to him, Mitt Romney’s vote for removal took extraordinary courage.
 

We are left with the conclusion that if the president’s party controls either house of Congress, the president is, indeed, above the law.

The purpose of this blog has been to chronicle the damage that President Trump has inflicted upon our democracy.  But he has been abetted by the increasing willingness of the Republican Party to violate political norms … and now this violation of a constitutional law.  It’s a previously unimaginable step toward the loss of our democracy 

We’re unlikely to heal this for decades!