No trial Is better than a sham trial
When should Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi transmit the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump?
Never.
Admittedly, that’s and audacious and risky strategy that no one has yet proposed as far as I know. I also doubt that Speaker Pelosi will pursue it. But she should.
One of the weaknesses of Democrats in resisting today’s junkyard dog Republicans is their nobility. Barack Obama could not quite grasp the perversity of people who fought like hell to deny health care to millions of Americans or entire Republican-dominated states that refused free money to expand Medicaid. He wasn’t prepared to counter the ferocity of GOP opposition to Obamacare, but the program survived because in this case popular support overcame Republican perversity.
Nancy Pelosi has been around longer and has no illusions, only hopes, about bipartisanship. Having watched as the Republicans transformed from a garden variety conservative political party basically working within legislative norms into a pack of pit bulls engaged in a no-bites barred dogfight. Every time Trump has attacked her, she forced him to retreat with his tail under his tail.
The whole ignoble crusade that Republicans have carried out for years aims to tear apart the fabric of decency that had been woven by generations of lawmakers of both parties, including environmental protection, income security, access to health care, a non-racial immigration policy, equal access to the ballot box and much more.
But I am not sure that even Pelosi, more comfortable with confrontation than Obama, is suited by personality and ethical scruples to match the Republicans Machiavellian move by Machiavellian move. That’s going to be needed to win the war over the impeachment narrative if Pelosi refuses to allow the irredeemably biased Senate jury to judge the case.
Should Pelosi choose that strategy, it should be accompanied with a clear and simple explanation. No judge would allow self-confessed biased jurors to sit in judgment even in a traffic case. Why allow a rabidly partisan “see-no-evil, hear no evil” jury to sit in judgment on one of the most significant trials in American history? No trial is better than a sham trial conducted by a kangaroo court. The latter is what Republican Senate leaders have publicly said they plan to do.
Politically, it’s critical that the Democrats anticipate and aggressively preempt the predictable GOP attack that Democrats are not submitting the articles because they don’t have a case. This will require the Dems to do something repulsive for a party made up mostly of decent people with independent moral judgement and a sense of fairness rather than ideological zealots who line up behind the Leader and justify his every crime and every cruelty.
It will take a campaign to delegitimize the Republicans, as a party and as individuals, to demonize them and vilify them, if that is what it takes. Not because the ends justify the means but because they deserve it. They demonize others for where they were born, or for their race or religion. They visit upon people the terrors of hell: children separated from their parents, clueless and confused about why or where their parents have gone and wondering if they will see their moms or dads ever again. Cruelty capable of inflicting a lifetime of psychological trauma deserves worse punishment than just harsh words.
No more lame talk about bipartisanship, civility, coming together, unity and all that. We need unity among all anti-racists, opponents of plutocracy, haters of cruelty and not of the stranger, believers in fairness and democracy. We need unity not for the sake of unity or kumbaya, but to beat them, and, if possible, crush them politically.
We shall also stop treating the GOP as a legitimate party. Today the Republican Party is not a conservative party or even a right-wing party. It is a reactionary party, the larval stage of a fascist party.
Is it any wonder anti-Semitism is on the rise, including anti-Semitic violence and anti-Semitic ideas like the crazy conspiracy theories that blame George Soros for Central American immigrant caravans? And who is the most virulent racist and anti-Semite in Congress? Iowa Republican Steve King, who consorted with Neo-Nazis on a trip to Austria, and has a long track record of making racist statements.
[A Brief Guide to Steve King’s Statements on Race]
Asked about one of King’s racist tirades, President Trump did not to comment. Perhaps, like in the wake of the murderous Neo-Nazi KKK rampage in Charlottesville, he thought there were good people among Austrian Neo-Nazis.
Until recently, the Republican Party responded to Steve King’s outrages with slaps on the wrist. Finally, the GOP had had enough, and recently kicked King off the committees to which he was assigned. This was after King said that if the Austrian Neo-Nazis he met lived in the United States, they would be Republicans. The Republican Party punished King too little, too late and for the wrong reason: telling the truth for once.
The argument that Trump and his Republican minions are apprentice fascists is bolstered by his latest outrage, his embrace of Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, a war criminal denounced by members of his own unit, who bravely broke the code of silence in speaking to the New York Times:
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Craig Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Fascist regimes celebrate their psychopathic killers as model warriors. So does Trump and his spokespeople. Even among the elite Navy Seal fighters Gallagher commanded, a moral conscience can survive the barbarity and the fog of war. Evil can be seen for what it is, as Craig Miller, Joshua Vriens, and Corey Scott have just demonstrated to their credit and the nation’s.
