To impeach and convict is to endorse democracy
Before there can be unity and healing in this nation, there must be accountability. Impeachment of President Donald Trump in the House, welcome as it is, must be followed, sooner rather than later, with conviction in the U.S. Senate for Trump’s role in inciting a mob to attack the Capitol last week — an attack on America that has become more grotesque with the passage of time.
Trump has more than earned the notoriety as the only president to be impeached twice. Congress must keep going. To convict Trump for incitement of an insurrection is to ensure he can never again seek federal office, but it is so much more. To convict would mark a full rebuke of a failed president who has no sense of responsibility for his words and actions, much less duty to democracy: “People thought what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump said Tuesday before flying to Texas to admire his ugly border wall for which Mexico never paid.
No, sir, your words have been condemned. To impeach is to formalize allegations. But to convict is to draw even firmer lines about where our elected officials stand when it comes to the sanctity of our democracy. Are they for it or against it? Will Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s chief enablers of the big lie about widespread voter fraud, convict Trump? How will Sen. John Cornyn, silent for so long about the presidential election outcome, vote? Let’s put it on the record. No spin.
Trump must be convicted in the Senate because appeasement for inciting insurrection only invites more insurrection. The rebuke of Trump from banks, the PGA Tour, corporate America and even New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, who has declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump, must be accompanied with a full rebuke from lawmakers.
There is an argument against impeachment and conviction that holding Trump accountable will somehow divide our nation. “It is past time for all of us to try to heal our country and move forward,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted. “Impeachment would be a major step backward.” To which we wonder, a major step backward from what? Insurrection? Mauling police officers? Killing a police officer? Chants of “Hang Mike Pence”? It’s absurd. It is not the accountability that is sparking division and enmity. It’s the lack of accountability. This isn’t on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or President-elect Joe Biden. They didn’t implore a mob to siege the Capitol by saying, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” as Trump did. To impeach and convict is to endorse democracy and free and fair elections. It is to stand for truth above partisanship.
While tragic and heartbreaking, this chapter in American history should be viewed as a necessary inflection point in condemning the big lie about widespread voting fraud that has assaulted our democracy.
To that end, as we have argued before, that condemnation must extend to those, like Cruz and indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who have voraciously advanced this lie, which has taken hold in the minds of so many Americans.
It is insulting for Cruz to rhetorically assault faith in our elections and then say, “What I was working to do is find a way to re-establish widespread trust in the system.” It is like an arsonist saying a blaze was set in order to rebuild. Again, he must be expelled.
In his book “Public Opinion,” published nearly a century ago, journalist Walter Lippman wrote: “For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”
It is the perfect distillation of the siege of the Capitol, an American tragedy fueled by the fiction of widespread voter fraud. A nadir that demands full accountability. Without accountability, there can be no unity.