Impeachment of Trump is the path to unity for nation
Two things are essential for our nation: We must move beyond the vicious, mendacious and anti-democratic presidency of Donald Trump. And Republicans must recognize both the fact of his electoral defeat and his role in inspiring insurrection against our nation’s system of free government.
This is why Democrats in the House of Representatives were right to force the issue of impeachment after Trump’s instigation of an attack on the nation’s Capitol, and the democratic process itself, whose extreme violence becomes ever clearer as more video from the assault emerges. The impeachment measure passed 232-197, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats.
The solutions endorsed by most Republicans? Amnesia, evasion and denial.
Amnesia about their own party’s role in encouraging Trump for four years. Evasion of the party’s complicity in advancing Trump’s dangerous falsehood that President-elect Joe Biden stole an election that the Democrat won decisively. And denial of their own responsibility, outlined eloquently by Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, during the debate over electoral college votes, to tell their own supporters the truth about the election’s outcome, and about Trump himself.
There is a school of thought — it has subscribers beyond the Republican duck-and-cover crowd — that impeaching Trump would get in the way of Biden’s effort to launch his presidency in a brisk and unifying way.
Republicans latched onto this argument Wednesday.
“Let us look forward, not backward,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said on the House floor during the debate. “Let us come together, not apart. Let us celebrate the peaceful transition of power to a new president, rather than impeaching an old president.”
That sounds lovely until you recognize a hard lesson from history: After a deeply divisive struggle, there can be no durable unity if one side continues to propagate myths, if those who have ripped a nation apart refuse to acknowledge their role in deepening its schisms, if crimes committed are swept under a rug woven from threads of politically convenient forgetfulness.
The effort to create a new order of racial justice in the South after our Civil War was thwarted for nearly a century because of myths spun by Confederates who cast a war for slavery as a noble lost cause and Reconstruction, an effort to democratize an unjust society, as oppressive.
It fell to a brave Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, to offer her party a better path. Her eloquent case for impeachment on Tuesday was cited again and again by Democrats.
“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President,” Cheney wrote. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
“You know,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., “what happened would never have happened if everybody stood up in unity and called out the president when he was not telling the American people the truth, when he was pushing a big lie. We will never have unity without truth, and also without accountability.”
As McGovern suggested, the road to repentance will be paved by truth and accountability. We can be thankful that the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment took the first steps.