Courage in an ‘alternative universe’
First came “alternative facts.” Now, the Congress and the nation are split into alternative universes, as Rep. Alcee Hastings described our constitutional crisis this week.
Two universes, with irreconcilable views of what is true and false and what is right and wrong.
The universe in which facts are facts and no one is above the law prevailed Wednesday when the House voted, for only the third time in our history, to impeach a president.
If what President Donald Trump did wasn’t impeachable, nothing would be.
He abused the power of his office, withholding money Congress had appropriated, in a scheme to coerce a foreign nation into helping him in our ensuing election. That emboldened Russia to maintain its lethal aggression against Ukraine, putting our own security at risk. Caught in the act, Trump openly invited Chinese assistance for his campaign and used all the muscle of his office to thwart the investigation that the House was duty-bound to make.
In that other universe, the one that lost the debate Wednesday, right and wrong depend entirely on who holds political power. Power is a virtue. Nothing else matters.
It is regrettable that the House vote was almost entirely partisan, with no Republicans honoring their oaths to protect the Constitution from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
To say that an issue is partisan, however, has less to do with the merits of an issue than with the motives of those debating it.
The Senate Republicans, sad to say, seem mired in that same dark-side universe where might is right and power determines what is true or false.
As they’re in the majority, the prospects of a fair trial on whether to remove Trump seem dismal. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has virtually promised Trump’s acquittal and is not consenting — yet — to calling for the administration witnesses and documents the president wrongfully denied to the House.
That explains why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t saying when — or even whether — she will send the two articles of impeachment to the Senate. Political reality dictates that at some point she must do that, but at the moment, it’s the only strategy she has to force McConnell to give the American people a fair trial.
The people are on her side about that. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll published this week, 70% — including nearly two-thirds of Republicans — think Trump should allow his top aides to testify.
For now, however, it’s appropriate to celebrate the courageous leadership of Pelosi and of Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chairs of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, who compiled what even the Republicans should have recognized as an ironclad case.
Twenty-eight Democratic freshmen earned their own profiles in courage by resisting fearsome pressure from the other side. Having been elected from districts Trump won in 2016, they were targeted in advertising blitzes. Only two others voted against both articles. Had just 13 of the 28 folded, Trump would have won.
Florida’s delegation voted entirely with their parties, as expected, though it was still disappointing to find Republicans Francis Rooney of Naples, who is retiring, and Mario Diaz-Balart on the wrong side of history.
For Broward and Palm Beach voters, however, now is a good time to write or call Reps. Hastings, Lois Frankel, Ted Deutch, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson to say “thank you.” Voting to impeach a president is difficult, no matter how well-deserved, and Trump’s voters won’t be forgiving.
What has happened to the Republicans’ view of political morality since they impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair with an intern? His offenses did not endanger our security or threaten to establish a dictatorship. Trump’s do.
Current events seem to fulfill Lord Acton’s famous maxim that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Yet people can resist that. Many do. “Politics doesn’t corrupt people. People corrupt politics,” said U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson Berman on Tuesday while sentencing Rick Gates, the former Trump campaign aide whose cooperation helped convict others in crimes uncovered during the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
That is certainly true of Trump, who has turned the Republican Party into his personal cult and who puts himself above all else. That sad fact was evident in the six typewritten pages of self-pitying, selfserving rant he sent to Pelosi on Tuesday. He papered the Senate with copies.
Misrepresentations, falsehoods and outright lies have become so common in Trump’s bizarre presidency that the letter was remarkable only in two respects.
One was that it packed so many of them into a single document. The New York Times annotated 19 and The Washington Post 21. He attributed to his adversaries every offense against the Constitution that he has committed, a defensive trait that psychologists call projection.
It also laid bare the utter hollowness of his character.
“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers,” he wrote to Pelosi, “you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying, ‘I pray for the President,’ when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I.”
Why is it so difficult for Trump, who claims to share the Christian faith, to believe that Pelosi would consider it her Christian duty to pray for his enlightenment?
The only part of the letter on which both universes might agree is that he wrote it “for the purpose of history, and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.”
In that record, historians will be astonished by his claim that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”
Twenty people were put to death in Salem before that madness subsided, convicted by “evidence” that was allowed to include dreams and hallucinations.
Only in a truly perverse alternative universe could that be called “due process.”