Fairness in Senate is now thing of the past
Whatever one thinks of the previous impeachments of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, there is no doubt that they received fair trials in the Senate.
We have moved into a quite different world now. Today, we instead are presented with Mitch McConnell, who can accurately be described as a pure apparatchik willing to treat Donald Trump as his own Dear Leader.
And, frankly, it is hard to find any Republican member of the Senate, “elder” or not, who inspires any confidence as to the possibility of truly independent or impartial judgment, not to mention a commitment to maintaining a system of separation of powers that requires accountability of presidents to Congress.
Otherwise able men and women are instead serving as useful idiots for a would-be tyrant who in fact imagines himself as the equivalent not of King George III, who recognized the limitations on his power imposed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but, instead, of Charles I, who was executed by Parliament for his failure to recognize that he was no long the unimpeded sovereign in Great Britain.
Few Republican senators feel it necessary even to be engaged in the kind of hypocrisy famously defined many years ago as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In McConnell’s world, though, there is no need even to pretend to impartiality; following the Boss’s orders is enough. This reality is what makes Trump a far more serious threat to our constitutional order than even Richard Nixon.
No single individual, including Trump, can corrupt our polity. Success requires capture of a political party and then of heretofore independent institutions within the executive branch. Trump has completely succeeded in the former, though the latter remains to be decided.
In any event, the best proof of the degraded nature of the contemporary United States Senate is precisely the unprecedented nature of the trial, apparently without new witnesses or evidence, that is envisioned. Given that we live in a society that, for better or worse, likes to rely on precedents (at least when they are convenient), acceptance of the McConnell rules and lack of further evidence will be a significant, and perhaps fatal, step to full-fledged authoritarianism rejected by the English in 1649 and then even more dramatically by Americans in 1776 and 1787.
And, of course, our polarization will only increase, inasmuch as no one who believes that Trump should be convicted can possibly treat as truly legitimate and thus a source of closure the sham trial that appears underway in the Senate.
It has no more integrity to it, as a “trial,” than the notorious Stalin “show trials” of the 1930s that also generated predetermined results.
That will be the enduring legacy of Mitch McConnell and his Republican allies.
Sanford Levinson is on the faculties of the University of Texas Law School and the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, with Yale Professor Jack M. Balkin, is “Democracy and Dysfunction.”