The Case for Impeachment

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee advanced two articles of impeachment against President Trump.  In the hand-wringing and the hubbub that has accompanied the whole of the impeachment process, I wish that the talking heads could pause and give themselves - and us - the time to think.

Impeachment is a Constitutional obligation.  But when it happens, it is a political process.  Because of that, and because it has happened before, some of the elected figures in our government - both Republican and Democrat - will treat it as part of politics.  For them, it’s about power: who has it; who wants it; and what can be done with it.

There will be no escaping that view of impeachment, no matter how rock solid the charges against the president may be.  There were Democrats, Jerry Nadler, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, among them, who called for impeachment of Trump almost from the start.  For them, that was at least as much about the fact that Trump lost the popular vote as anything else.  They felt the will of the people had been subverted in 2016.

Fair enough.  The will of the people had been subverted when Donald Trump secured the presidency.  The people had selected Hillary Clinton.  But the Electoral College, the Constitutional method by which we select the president, chose Donald Trump.  Therefore the presidency was his.  Galling and infuriating as it is, that was the Constitutional outcome in 2016.

But.

There’s always a but.

Winning power is not the same as securing power.  Donald Trump never seemed to understand that and the mistake has cost Donald Trump and the Republican party.  Worse than that, it has cost this nation.  We are three years into a presidency with a president who is wholly unqualified, a liar and cheater at every turn.  He’s a racist, misogynist, thoughtless, ignorant, and unpopular leader.  He has sought to use the presidency to further enrich and empower himself and his business interests.  He has openly asked for foreign interference in American elections.

None of us are under any obligation to ignore these facts. Elected members of Congress, people sworn to uphold the Constitution, must not ignore them and they must enforce the Constitution.  Presidents who violate the Constitution must be impeached.

That is the reality we face right now.  Things will get even uglier as this political process unfolds.  The Senate, controlled by Republicans, is unlikely to vote to remove the President from office. The party of Lincoln has abandoned principle in favor of politics.  But that doesn’t excuse the Democrats from seeking to fulfill their Constitutional obligation.  The process will be ugly and unpleasant; it very likely will further strain the bonds that hold the nation together.  So be it.  

Justice is rarely easy.  This case is no exception.

2019 and a Thread of Hope

At some point in the last week of 2018 I realized that 2019 would bring us one step closer to the end of Donald Trump.  Strictly speaking, I have marked that happy news every day since this inept and cruel man took office.  But 2019 really does feel significant; next year we have a presidential election and we can refuse to re-elect him.  This year, candidates will be ginning up to make the challenge.  Elizabeth Warren has already announced that she will explore a run.  That alone changes the tenor of the political landscape; she’s not going to be quiet while Trump endangers us.  She’s willing to lead and will pull mightily in another direction.  

That’s hopeful.

There is no guarantee that the national discourse will shift and the limits of the Electoral College remain.  But 2019 feels like Trump’s days are limited.  I will certainly do my best to see him lose the White House.  While I eagerly await for the Mueller report, my hopes for the end of Trump don’t rest on that report alone.  For starters, I’ve grown weary of the wait.  In addition, I don’t really expect that any of the Republicans in Congress will stand up for decency and against Trump.  They haven’t thus far, though each week (sometimes each day!) brings new evidence that Trump is not suited to be the nation’s president.  I don’t expect that anything Mueller reports will change the minds of the GOP’s leaders.

But I watched Nancy Pelosi be sworn in as Speaker with an assortment of children around her and I felt pride.  The sheer number of women elected to the House feels like progress; like we are moving in the right direction.  I do have hope about our nation’s voters.  Even accounting for the disaster that is the Electoral College, I feel it.  It seems like a wispy thing, hope in such an era as this.  But it’s all that we have; all that I have.  So I will hold tightly to it and live in hope.

Supremely Well Played

When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, I figured that Democrats would fight the good fight and lose anyway.  We’d have yet another Supreme Court justice well to the right of the center (and actual American public opinion), especially on the issue of the right to privacy and abortion.

Now that federal court nominations are filibuster-proof, a Democratic party short of 51 seats in the Senate is doomed to lose.  I had little hope that Republican pro-choice senators like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins would save us.  Of course they would ask Kavanaugh how he felt about Roe v. Wade and of course he would say it is “settled law.”  Murkowski and Collins would act as if this was re-assuring while the rest of us would know that the answer was anything but since the Supreme Court’s primary power is to alter whatever “settled” law they wish to change.  Roe would quickly be unravelled and then we’d be fighting like hell to hold on to marriage equality.  Reasonable gun control didn’t have a prayer.

I wouldn’t say that I was sanguine about this prospect.  It would be yet another in the chain of horrifying developments that is the Trump Administration.  I would not give up hope and I’d continue to fight like mad to ensure that in subsequent elections there would be enough motivated voters to back our nation off the political ledge that is Donald Trump and his merry band of right-wing bigotry.  

In an office discussion, my boss and I made one of our one dollar bets.  He took confirmation for a dollar and I was sporting, taking the side of a “no” vote for Kavanaugh.  I figured the money was gone but I like to indulge in bitter, ironic laughter.  Clearly, I hadn’t accounted for Senator Chuck Schumer’s willingness to play political hard ball.  At every step of the confirmation process, the Democratic minority leader and his fellow senators have played the long-game on the Kavanaugh nomination.  Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris were heroic in their willingness to insist upon full release of Kavanaugh’s records as well as persistence on the very hard questions.  They played it so well that although I still expected confirmation I felt the Democrats had set us up for a longer term win, suggesting enough doubts about Kavanaugh that we could use the issue to encourage better Democratic turnout in 2018 and well beyond.

I also came to believe that the combination of Republican urgency to confirm and complete unwillingness to release documents related to Kavanaugh was an odd and troubling decision.  Of course, I find many GOP positions to be odd and troubling so this was no surprise.  Then we got the bombshell accusation about Kavanaugh’s behavior as a teenager and an accuser willing to step forward.

The GOP has its hands tied now: refusal to listen to Christine Blasey Ford will haunt them now and later; they know it and have devised a strategy whereby she is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary committee on Monday next.  Blasey Ford and Senate Democrats want an FBI investigation, which adds time to the clock, a position that is both politically savvy on their part and likely the best approach no matter your politics.  Republicans, with an eye on the coming November 2018 midterm, want a nomination sealed and delivered before election day.  They know there is a coming accounting for their inexcusable placement of party over nation and they see Kavanaugh as one final reward before their caskets start being politically sealed for a generation.

And so we have a stand-off, not just between Senate Democrats and Republicans, but between a nation of women, most of whom know that Blasey Ford is telling the truth because we know the kind of courage it takes for a woman to come forward and tell her story.  I don’t believe that all men engage in the behavior that Kavanaugh demonstrated; I know plenty of men who are decent people drunk or sober.  I am willing to believe that Kavanaugh only did it once.  But I don’t excuse irresponsible teenage behavior that comes without regret and a willingness to change its ways.  My problem isn’t just the assault, it’s Kavanaugh’s unwillingness to be forthright about what happened.  

We are in a strange place as a nation, with a dishonest and dishonorable man in the White House, the leader of a party whose moral conscience is largely made up of cowardly jelly.  The Republican party can see its reckoning on the horizon.  When I bet against Kavanuagh’s confirmation, I never expected to win but it feels close and even if I lose my dollar and Kavanaugh is sworn into the Court, I have a powerful feeling that we are closing in on a reckoning that will change this nation forever.  I can already smell the hope and change coming our way.  

No Good Choices

I have followed the civil war in Syria since it began.  Disheartening as it is, the news that Bashir al-Assad authorized the use of sarin nerve gas on his people (likely for a second time) was no particular surprise to me.  While I understand the reasoning behind the Obama Administration's condemnation of the attack and the reluctant decision to consider a military response, I remain undecided as to a proper response to Assad's actions.  Syria is a mess with good guys in short supply.  The fact is that while there are plenty of policy options on the table (invade, bomb a lot, bomb a little, do nothing), none of them are very good choices.   

Those bad choices are made worse by the reluctance of traditional American allies to support us.  This has less to do with the fact that there are no good options or even international criticism of Obama foreign policy than it does with the very painful reality that our Bush-era post 9/11 foreign policy choices were so grossly abusive of our allies. The ways we handled Afghanistan in the years after our invasion have not inspired the world's confidence, let alone our allies.  There, an attack that might very well have had a legitimate purpose, rapidly evolved into a morass of poor planning made worse by the arrogance of American leaders.  But it was our ill-advised invasion of Iraq, driven by the assertions lies that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that really tipped the balance against the U.S. as an honest broker of foreign policy information.  

Between Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of people have died as a result of American hubris.  There is a continuing price to be paid for it, as the Obama Administration is learning right now.  In dealing with Syria in 2013, we are reaping the consequences of America's failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The world no longer sees the U.S. as a reliable voice of the moral high ground.  Our motives are suspect and our judgment is no longer guaranteed to be trustworthy.

None of this is to excuse the Obama Administration from some errors in the handling of the complex problem that is Syria.  But there was never an obvious or easy policy road in Syria and that reality, combined with our own actions after 9/11, has landed us squarely in this moment.   Given the U.S. domestic political climate right now, I think that President Obama was right to ask for Congressional authorization before he takes military action.  It speaks volumes about our own dysfunctional politics that those conversations have been less about what is needed in Syria than it is has been yet another opportunity for the GOP to throw mud in the President's direction.   These days our own behavior is a cautionary tale about democracy.

In the meantime, the U.N. estimates that more than 6.5 million Syrians have been displaced.  There are thousands of Syrian refugees pouring into camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.  Innocents suffer and die while different factions in Syria maneuver for power.  The Syrian government is a threat to its own citizens.  Just as there seem to be no good choices for the Syrians, there are no good choices for American foreign policy toward Syria.  Worse yet is the reality that in the United States we have lost sight about the source of our foreign policy leadership failure, seemingly anxious to prove decisively that we are no longer fit to lead the world.

What He Said

I am fond of making jokes at the expense of sensible midwesterners.  In fact, I like to believe that I've turned it into something of an art form.  But the facts demonstrate that our nation could use a little more common sense in the conduct of our politics.  So it is that I am directing y'all to read the wisdom of the sage of the prairie, Warren Buffet.

He's talking to you, Tea Party. Time to listen up.

Enough Already

Tired of the debt ceiling budget crap?  Me too.  I imagine that you'll be relieved to discover that we actually don't need to be worried about any of it.  But, in fact, the current budget and debt hysteria is needless.  Need proof?  Head on over to Kevin Drum at Mother Jones to see the facts.

Read it and weep for your republic.

A Waiting Game

Early Friday morning, when the news revealed that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei pronounced the results of the recent Iranian election "fair," I thought to myself that saying it's "fair" just doesn't make it so. But that's an historical lesson that more than one leader has had to experience before it gets learned.

Khamenei might be forgiven his somewhat foolish announcement if one considers it in context. He's certainly not the first Iranian leader to announce things are just fine only to find himself overtaken by events on the ground. That kind of hubris brought down the Shah of Iran in 1978. The next year, a false belief that things were just fine would eventually turn out the seemingly moderate leadership who replaced the Shah. By the end of the year, Iran went from one dictator (the Shah) to another (the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini) and his system of constitutional theocracy. That's the system still in place In Iran today.

In my mind, the most instrumental lesson to be learned from the events of 30 years ago is that those changes didn't happen overnight. Over the course of 1979, a year best remembered in the United States for the dismal and demoralizing imprisonment of Americans in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, what had been a hopeful democratic movement was overtaken by a form of radical Islamic fundamentalism that has held sway in Iran ever since. Though we are loathe to recall, it was democracy that gave Iran it's peculiar political system. Sometimes, people make choices that are not good for them.

Until now.

Maybe.

The fact is that current Supreme Leader Khamenei and his government, headed now by President Ahmadinejad, may have both the will and the power to violently shut down the people who have taken to the streets to protest the results of the election. Or Iranian citizens who feel the election was dishonest and unfair, a people perhaps numbering the millions, may prevail. It's really to soon to tell.

The Obama Administration has to try and work with whatever government is in place in Iran. Whether or not the Americans view the Iranian government as a legitimate one is an interesting question, but it won't necessarily change the facts on the ground. If anything, what the Iranian resistance most needs right now is to be seen as a truly domestic insurrection, not as an agent of western pressures. That's a task best fulfilled by brave Iranians willing to take a risk on behalf of their own freedom.

And so we wait.

PS: Those of you interested in the role of social networking sites in the Iranian protests might be interested in this NPR interview with Ethan Zuckerman, who studies that very issue at Harvard's Berkman Center of Internet and Society. Fascinating.

PPS: And then there is Juan Cole, a first-rate scholar of the Middle East. Read him to make sense of events on the ground in Iran.