This was my mantra through eight years of Obama. Politics takes time. It’s too bad that the average citizen doesn’t have the attention span to handle this basic fact of life. If they had the patience to wait and see what the Democrats could have done, then we wouldn’t have had 6 years of Republican control of the legislature. We wouldn’t have had a guaranteed result of no progress for Obama’s agenda, since it takes a cooperative legislature to enact the policies that the administration wants to put in place.
After stymying Obama for six years, the citizenry, appalled by the dysfunction of the US government that they created, put a known con-artist in the White House with the help of a calcified election structure that should have been revamped a hundred years ago. So we have a con-artist for president, and a congress that was elected with him from the same party, just like Obama had. What did they achieve?
Apparently nothing, because almost nothing has been done in three years, which is amazingly less than was done with Obama in charge and a congress that hated him working against him. The Trump congress did manage to give themselves and their donor base handsome tax cuts. They did manage to do that.
The Republican party is wholly corrupt. If it wasn’t wholly corrupt the Republican congressional leadership would have started an impeachment inquiry on January 20, 2017. After all, Trump is a demonstrable con-artist, tax cheat, draft dodger, etc. Because they didn’t do that, and because the citizenry did not bring life to a standstill in revolt over Trump’s blatant abuses of power, we were forced to wait until 2018 when a new congress could be seated in order to get things to change.
A little less than a year later and the impeachment inquiry has finally, officially, started. It has started now that Robert Mueller has said in no uncertain terms Congress must act to remove the President. (paraphrasing) After Trump stonewalls every attempt to investigate the abuses of power that he openly admits to engaging in. Repeatedly, proudly admits to violating the laws of the land. Laws which he announces to the world don’t apply to him. Finally we are seeing action being taken.
Finally.
Nancy Pelosi has been tasked with the job of engaging in a coup without having it look like what she is doing is staging a coup. The entire Trump administration; his cabinet officials, his Vice President, all of his political appointees and all of the judges that have been seated on his recommendation, all of those people have to be investigated and removed from office if the conditions of them getting the job they now have in some way relates to the blatant criminal behavior of one Donald J. Trump. Mike Pence is every bit as complicit in Trump’s criminal dealings as Trump and McConnell are. Every one of them will have to go before this house cleaning session is over.
Thoroughly cleaning house in this fashion will put Nancy Pelosi in the office of the president. She is the third in line for the presidency, and with the President and Vice President removed from office because of their high crimes, she becomes President. How, exactly, is someone supposed to pull that off without looking like that was your goal all along? To become president? Half of the country will say she is staging a coup no matter what she does now. I don’t know anyone who could do the job that needs to be done now that won’t be resisted just because what they are doing is overturning what half of the people who voted in the 2016 election decided.
Coup d’etat. Can it be a coup d’etat when what’s occurring is required by law? The Orange Hate-Monkey will consider losing an election a coup, which makes any objection he might offer on being forced out of office prematurely irrelevant. Stormtrumpers on the other hand are the ideological descendants of the only successful coup in United States history. The one where white supremacists overthrew duly elected governments all across the South, governments put in place by black majorities that were finally liberated by the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the US constitution by Southern states, a condition set on their re-entry into the United States after the end of the Civil War.
In Wilmington, I found a very remarkable condition of affairs. The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election … All shades of political beliefs were represented: but in the presence of what they believed to be an overwhelming crisis, they brushed aside the great principles that divide parties and individuals, and stood together as one man. When I emphasize the fact, that every block in every ward was thus organized, and that the precautionary meetings were attended by ministers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, railroad officials, cotton exporters, and, indeed, by the reputable, taxpaying, substantial men of the city, the extent and significance of this armed movement can, perhaps, be realized. It was not the wild and freakish organization of irresponsible men, but the deliberate action of determined citizens … Military preparations, so extensive as to suggest assault from some foreign foe, must have had unusual inspiration and definite purpose.
The fiat had gone forth; and it was expected that the Negroes, when they learned that the right of suffrage was to be denied them, would resist. From their churches and from their lodges had come reports of incendiary speeches, of impassioned appeals to the blacks to use the bullet that had no respect for color, and the kerosene and torch that would play havoc with the white man’s cotton in bale and ware house. It was this fear of the Negro uprising in defence of his electorate — of a forcible and revengeful retaliation — that offered an ostensible ground for the general display of arms; but if the truth be told, the reason thus offered was little more than a fortunate excuse. The whites had determined to regain their supremacy; and the wholesale armament was intended to convey to the blacks an earnest of this decision. There would have been rapid-fire guns and Winchester rifles if every church had held a silent pulpit, and every lodge-room where the Negroes met had been empty. White supremacy, therefore, was the magnet that attracted, the tie that bound, the one overwhelming force that dominated everything.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
White supremacists took up arms and forced the poor people and the black people and other minorities back under their heels, at the point of a gun. White supremacists, what the press these days calls the alt-right or white nationalist, or what I refer to as stormtrumpers. They have enforced their will with violence, again and again, all while pointing to their victims as the instigators of the violence. “If you only did what I told you to do, I wouldn’t have to be hanging you right now.” Those people support Trump today. Will we let them win, again?
One thing is certain. Trump cannot be allowed to stand for election. Even allowing him to stand would be to concede that the laws do not apply to him and through him the presidency. If he is allowed to stand and even if he is defeated at the ballot box, the next president will go even farther than he has because there are no limits on what a president can or can’t do, unless we punish Trump to the fullest extent of the law. Impeach him, remove him from office, convict him of his crimes, convict his children of their crimes, seize the entirety of their wealth and distribute that wealth among his victims as restitution. Unless we make an example of Trump, the next president will point to Trump and say he got away with it, why can’t I?
I don’t see that happening. Do you?
Maybe it will happen. I don’t know. What I do know is that the United States that existed before Trump is dead. I mourn its loss, but it is well and truly gone now. What comes after Trump will be something that we have to make for ourselves. Here’s hoping that we are up to the task.
And if that better future means the politicians who demanded our trust, our support, our future are unable or unwilling to choose that better path, unwilling to risk their own safety or their careers or their political party, to save that future, then to hell with them.
Stonekettle Station
