Impeachment vote shows moral paralysis in America
Last November, an underfunded public elementary school in Berkeley, California, raised $800 for classroom supplies by hosting a “parents’ night out.” To help keep the children occupied, one dad brought along a DVD copy of Disney’s “The Lion King” he had purchased at Best Buy. A few days ago, the school received notice from Disney’s licensing firm that it had violated copyright law and owed Disney $250.
When school officials and parents protested, the licensing firm responded that a license is required any time a DVD is shown outside the home. Moreover, rules are rules, and people who break them must face the consequences. Particularly galling to school personnel and parents is the role Disney plays in their financial plight. Companies like Disney still pay property taxes based on 1978 assessments and have successfully blocked reassessment efforts that could result in substantial tax revenues to support schools.
Amid the bright lights of the legal and political spectacle played out in Washington last week, this story of a beleaguered PTA sounds a bit like the famous parable an ancient prophet once told a powerful king who had his neighbor killed so he could have the neighbor’s wife. Rules are rules, and those who break them must face consequences? Really? Do they apply equally to the powerful and to ordinary folk? And does the scale of the crime play any part in determining just consequences?
A quarter-century ago a Republican-led Congress launched special prosecutor Ken Starr on a mission to find criminal activity somewhere in President Bill Clinton’s personal finances. Starr never found that, but he did get wind of a consensual sexual dalliance Clinton had carried on with a young White House intern. Clinton denied the relationship and tried to cover it up, so Republicans in the House of Representatives impeached him for lying and obstruction. Mr. Starr declared any man who would lie about such things untrustworthy and morally unfit to be president.
Senate Democrats had enough votes to block removing Clinton from office, mostly arguing that a private workplace affair, however tawdry, didn’t warrant unseating a president. Arguably, this has set a precedent of sorts. As we have learned repeatedly over the past three years, a president’s marital fidelity and sexual exploits, along with whatever lies and cover-ups attend them, remain off-limits when it comes to judging fitness for office.
Numerous senators who voted this week not to remove Mr. Trump from office concurred with prosecutors that the president had violated laws as well as the constitution by enlisting a foreign nation’s aid in gaining reelection, but even that, they determined, did not reach the level of an impeachable offense. A few senators privately admitted voting based on fear of reprisal, and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander argued that even justified removal would inflame our already dangerous culture wars. In other words, we’re afraid to do the right thing.
This vote will also set precedents. Manipulations and involvement of foreign nations in our national elections have now been judged no big deal. Even as we hunt down and imprison foreign refugees and asylum seekers, foreign oligarchs and their shady agents who connive beneath the covers of propriety among legislators and lobbyists have become merely business as usual.
Scariest of all are the admissions of lost nerve. When a nation becomes morally paralyzed in the face of a loudmouthed bully and his chanting enablers, we risk reincarnating a monster that some of our parents and grandparents gave their lives to help stop in the 20th century. As our current election cycle heats up, we’ll need all the sobriety we can muster.