John Buell

Impeachment and the Democratic Prospect

Pro—Trump Impeachment

He began his tenure as a minority president, receiving 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. Other leaders in similar circumstances might have regarded compromise as both morally appropriate and politically pragmatic. His victory in the undemocratic electoral college was premised on explicit and deceitful racist appeal. It was facilitated by his and his party’s massive voter suppression efforts.

During the campaign, candidate Trump promised that he would drain the swamp of those neoliberal elements that had so burdened the working class. He spoke of endless foreign wars of no benefit to our nation and called NATO obsolete.

The only promise he has kept has been the unrelenting racist agenda that includes attempts to send asylum seekers back to the dangerous counties of their origin. Not content with the harm family separation has wrought, he has portrayed these immigrants in the language and bodily style of virulent white nationalism and terrorist militias.

The attack on immigrants and asylum seekers has included unspeakable prison conditions and cruelty to families and children. These actions are meant to send a message and to reassure his based. His carefully scripted messages of sorrow in the wake of mass shootings are themselves a signal of his lack of empathy. As one guest on Democracy Now! put it, you” don’t read emotion” from a teleprompter. His tepid performances do reassure the base that he cares not for victims of racist or misogynist violence.

Meanwhile, as the climate crisis grows and inequality festers, taxes for the wealthy are cut while our already decrepit infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

While the president slanders emigrants from horrors, many of which are of US origin, the climate and extinction crises grow. Not only are the programs to address these issues repudiated or unfunded, many of the nonpartisan government scientists charged with addressing these are harassed, belittled, driven out of government. Our lives may depend on climate science even as the president attacks not only its findings but the source of these and future reports.

In foreign policy not only has he failed to extricate US soldiers from foreign wars he has abrogated — without Congressional input or authorization — treaties that reduce the ever present risk of nuclear holocaust. Worse still, his threats to use these weapons only intensifies the arms race and brings the world closer to another war, again without Congressional input. This is a president who has casually suggested the murder of 10 million Afghanis.

He has governed by decree. The president has misappropriated funds for the building of his wall and proclaimed a false national emergency to justify these acts. He prevents current and former members of his administration from testifying before Congress, thereby crippling that body’s vital oversight function. He counts on a judiciary increasingly stacked with his partisans not to interfere with his agenda

He has turned the Department of Justice into an instrument of his political goals and a tool by which he obstructs rather than pursues justice.

These acts constitute the sort of tyranny the founding fathers had in mind and for which they authored impeachment alternatives. Stacking the judiciary, interfering with ongoing criminal investigations and misappropriating funds amount to a repudiation of the separation of powers rightly regarded as a vital barrier to tyranny.

Perhaps most dangerous of all under this presidency is encouragement of violence against minorities and peaceful political opponents. As Mehdi Hassan of the Intercept puts it: “Trump is nothing less than a threat to our collective security. More and more commentators now refer, for example, to the phenomenon of “stochastic terrorism” — originally defined by an anonymous blogger back in 2011 as “the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable.

Some say the House should not impeach because the Senate will never follow. Nonetheless, Democrats should make the case. Jeffrey Isaac argues the case well. Impeachment “will not result in the removal of Trump from office via impeachment.

A successful impeachment process will be divisive and contentious and very public and very enlightening.

But it will result in the political exposure and weakening of Trump and his Republican enablers, so that they can better be defeated at the polls in 2020.

To refuse to challenge Trump’s legitimacy is to cede him a legitimacy he does not deserve, and to allow him to continue to use that claim as a battering ram against Democrats and against democracy.” Impeachment proceedings can be initiated with protection of the rights of the president and thereby serve as a lesson.

That such action distracts from important policy areas such as health care and a Green infrastructure is hardly persuasive as no activity is proceeding on these fronts now. An impeachment agenda and articulation of a progressive policy alternatives help sustain each other.

That previous presidents bear some responsibility for Trump’s crimes is beyond doubt and should not be denied. Previous presidents should be called to the bar of history for helping to bequeath us Trump. But at some point the aggregation of abuses, crimes, and atrocities in all these areas by this president reaches a tipping point beyond which any prospect of a democratic future will be unlikely

As is frequently pointed out, the Constitution does not define high crimes and misdemeanors. To me a set of actions and policies that in combination endanger democracy is a high crime and misdemeanor. In any case the assault on democracy is ongoing under this administration. An impeachment process will not by itself stop that assault but could be part of a multifaceted political process to enable and encourage our citizens to regain our democracy.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine and writes on labor and environmental issues. His books include “Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Email Jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2019

Populist.com