The GOP is a party in need of a purge
The Democratic party in the U.S. has stars ascending of all races, genders, ethnicities and faiths.
The Republicans have a whole bunch of aging white guys who couldn’t find their moral rectum with two hands. One Black senator. Default party of white supremacists, anti-Semites, fascists, militia marauders, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloos, unhinged conspiracy theorists and a rogue’s gallery of rebel yell anarchists. Which is where the party will remain, stuck in its Donald Trump thrall — fear of — absent a purge of its monstrous components.
That the GOP derailed the impeachment of Trump on the weekend was a foregone conclusion. Naturally the unshamed ex-president, inciterin-chief of the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6 — seen golfing on Sunday with one of his wretched sons — trumpeted it as a victory.
It was emphatically not. He’s still been impeached — again — in the House. He’s still byproxy responsible for the death of five people in that rampage, including a police officer. (Two other officers have since committed suicide.) He’ll still go down in history — in infamy, in flames — as the worst, most unfit, most despotic, most mendacious American president ever and the only one to have directly kindled an insurrection against the citadel of democracy.
When Rep. Jamie Raskin, lead impeachment manager — lead prosecutor — concluded arguments on Saturday, he invoked the words of the Black cop who’d been beaten by rioters and had the N-word flung at him more than a dozen times: “Is this America?”
A maddened America, yet also, critically, an America that forcefully rejected Trump in November for the decency of Joe Biden.
More words etched in acid, these from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Then he voted to acquit. McConnell seized upon the fig leaf that Trump, now a private citizen in his Mar-aLago internal exile, is beyond the reach of Congress; that the trial itself was not constitutional. Despite more than 150 legal scholars of all political leanings who put their names to a letter declaring the exact opposite.
But where McConnell led — insofar as he still holds the reins within a fractured caucus — 43 other spineless Republican senators followed, ensuring Trump would waltz on the charge of inciting insurrection.
The 57-43 majority fell short of the two-thirds major required to convict. Seven Republicans of conscience — the most bipartisan vote for conviction of a president in the annals of impeachment — joined the 50 Democratic lawmakers. Conviction would have disqualified Trump from ever running again, a scenario that has paralyzed the party and inspirited his adoring constituency of dunces.
A political charge, not a criminal charge. In a real court, judged by a jury of unbiased peers, Trump would have been a goner, removed in cuffs, such was the overwhelming evidence against him.
In real court, though, no judge would have permitted inclusion of the hearsay evidence of a telephone conversation relayed to and recounted by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler. One of 10 Republicans who’d voted to impeach Trump in the House, Beutler said Trump refused to call off the mob, as the storming of the Capitol was happening, when House minority leader Kevin McCarthy had beseeched him to do so during a desperate phone call.
“When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol,” Buetler avowed. “McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” (Her italics.)
That statement backed up the blockbuster scoop from CNN’s Jamie Gangel on Friday night about the shouty expletiveladen call. In that moment at least, before McCarthy later went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring — he stood up the president.
“Who the f-- do you think you’re talking to?”
Impeachment managers, the entire Democratic party, was plunged into prosecutorial disarray with that 11th-hour disarray, at the end of a week where they’d meticulously built up the damning case against Trump. Arguments raged through the night, as reported by The Washington Post, with some passionately advocating for a final furious push — a more intensive investigation and damn the trial stretching consequences. Call witnesses.
There were, of course, no witnesses summoned in the trial. Trump had declined to appear in his own defence. That had been the agreement, to hasten the process, House managers instead relying on tremendously effective video from the violent invasion of the Capitol, some of which — from security cameras — had never been seen before.
They could have subpoenaed McCarthy or anybody else with direct knowledge of Trump’s state of mind, his purported glee at what his supporters had wrought, even flay-tweeting Mike Pence after the vicepresident was seen being evacuated from the Chamber by security as the horde encroached, hollering “HANG MIKE PENCE!”
But calling Beutler — the only witness Raskin was requesting — would have meant days, weeks, even months to conduct depositions, compile further research, wade through the legal wrangle, with Trump’s lawyers warning they would therefore call maybe 100 witnesses of their own.
The Senate actually voted in favour of calling witnesses, which was averted with a compromise reached — Beutler’s statement was merely read into the record.
It was, many observers agree, a rare misstep by the impeachment managers. If unlikely to change any Republican minds, Beutler could have amplified the historical record of the trial, doubled down further on Trump’s manifest culpability for the horrors that unfolded, his indifference to the clear and present danger faced by Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and everybody else in the Capitol.
“Listen, we didn’t need more witnesses,” Del. Stacey Plaskett said on Sunday.
“We needed more senators with spines.”
Plaskett, representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, was one of the aforementioned trial supernovas. She made history as the first non-voting delegate to be appointed an impeachment manager. The Virgin Islands, as a territory, doesn’t have a vote in Congress, meaning she was not permitted to vote for Trump’s impeachment on the House floor.
But she was luminous at the podium, on her day in the spotlight — Plaskett introduced the most startling evidence, the previously unseen security footage — wearing a “St. Croix” blue dress with matching cape. Some disapprove of commenting on a female politician’s clothes as irrelevant, except in this case the outfit became meme relevant, literally presenting as a caped crusader, the ensemble going viral on social media, photoshopped with a Superwoman “S” on the bodice.
Born in Brooklyn, raised in public housing, a one-time Republican serving in the Justice Department of the George W. Bush administration, Plaskett was a noble and righteous presence on the impeachment squad. “The vice-president, the speaker of the house, the first and second in line to the presidency, were performing their constitutional duties presiding over the election certification, and they were put in danger. President Trump put a target their backs, and his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.”
Notably, Plaskett was the only Black female elected official in the room for the Senate trial. She pointedly called out the defence team when they screened a montage of video clips showing Democratic politicians using the term “fight” in rhetorical flourishes — a completely false equivalence to Trump urging his supporters on Jan. 6 to “FIGHT,” take back their government, their country.
“I’ll briefly say that defence counsels put a lot of videos out in their defence, playing clip after clip of Black women … fighting for a cause or an issue or a policy. It’s not lost on me that so many of them were people of colour and women. Black women. Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children, your children.
“I thought we were past that. I think maybe we’re not.”
Plaskett, like every member on the impeachment roster of nine, is a lawyer; in fact an A-student of Raskin’s at American University. All of them brought soaring oratorical skill to the job. Nearly as impressive was Rep. Joe Neguse from Colorado, youngest of the managers at 34, son of Eritrean refugees.
But the moral pith of the team was Raskin, who somehow found the fortitude to persevere following the death of his son by suicide on New Year’s Eve. Persuasive, utilizing his razor sharp insights from a quarter-century teaching constitutional law, and the zeal of a progressive Democratic, Raskin was wreathed in graciousness, even as he dismantled defence arguments, most of which were laughably inane in any event.
To the victors do not go the spoils.
Only the rotting carcass of a despoiled party.
Conviction would have disqualified Trump from ever running again, a scenario that has paralyzed the party and inspirited his adoring constituency of dunces