We Have to Save Ourselves

Robert Mueller is testifying before the House of Representatives today.  There is nearly a fever pitch of excitement about this political moment.  I’m interested, of course.

But I am not hopeful.

By all accounts, including his own statements, Robert Mueller does not wish to testify today; he has no plans to say anything more than was in his original report.  For heaven’s sake, he willingly sought the guidance of Trump stooge and Attorney General Barr before he has even uttered a word.  Mueller is going to stick to the report here and we’re not going to learn what he thinks outside of it.  I’ve read a great deal of the report and I think it is damning.  But once the Trump-controlled Justice Department declined to prosecute, the ball landed squarely in the hands of Congress.  They can’t prosecute, but they can impeach.  So far, they’ve not come close; I don’t expect anything that Mueller says today to change that calculation.

Though there are many Democrats who are clearly frustrated and wish to impeach the president (and, good lord, he deserves that fate and then some), the reality on the ground is that as long as the GOP stands by Trump, impeachment goes nowhere.  It was in Congressional inquiries that the wheels fell off the Nixon bus.  When Republican Senator Howard Baker called out the president’s duplicity, the tide began to turn against Nixon.  Baker was a principled and brave man with a safe Senate seat.  That cannot be said about the current crop of Republican Senators, who can’t find a single principle together, let alone on their own.   They plan to dance with them that brung ‘em and haven’t yet found cause to do anything other than occasionally disagree with Trump.  Even that is accomplished in a hand-wringing weasel-loyalist fashion that offers no hope of full-scale condemnation, let alone action.  Republicans are not interested in opposing or impeaching Trump.  Nothing that Mueller says today will move the needle on that front.

We must save ourselves.  That requires a well-informed, consistently angry population who demands that the Congress take action against our venal, lying, self-serving president.  This has always been the case and nothing that happens today will change that fact.