Richard Wolffe: Republicans march over the impeachment cliff – taking their self-respect with them


How will the nation’s Republican senators look anyone in the face and say they have any rights to keep in check a corrupt and criminal president? How can they pretend to be Trump’s victims when they marched themselves off a constitutional cliff? And how on earth can they pretend to the world that their vision of America – where a president can happily use military aid to coerce a foreign government to smear his political rival in an election – is the model for democracy?

Let’s be honest. There was little drama or suspense in Trump’s impeachment trial, save for the bat-excrement quality of crazy that tumbled out of Alan Dershowitz’s mouth. According to Harvard’s emeritus law professor, presidents are unimpeachable as long as they think they are acting in the national interest when they use their power to corrupt their own election.  This could have been valuable analysis for Richard Nixon, but it also serves to question the value of a Harvard law professor. Perhaps it’s only the detritus who become emeritus. 

Dershowitz claimed he said no such thing, but our eyes and ears suggested otherwise. He also said he supported Nixon’s almost-impeachment, naturally. Which is to say: the Harvard man is the perfect specimen of what Trump has propagated through the body politic: a contagious coronavirus of chronic lying, cowardly ambition and plain old corruption.

For all the fake angst about calling witnesses – did Mitch McConnell wobble on the votes to stop them or is he actually manipulating the media every day? – the searing testimony of John Bolton would have done nothing, zippo, nada, to change the final vote. The facts of Trump’s corruption were never in dispute. The notion that this doesn’t rise to impeachable crimes has always been a joke.

We could play the age-old parlor game of asking how our esteemed Republican senators would have responded to Barack Obama asking the French government to investigate Mitt Romney’s missionary exploits ahead of the 2012 election. But what’s the point? Today’s Republican party elected to remove their spinal cords three years ago, along with much of their frontal lobe and their self-respect. They wring their hands in private and lament their lampoon-worthy leader whose shoes they must lick on a daily basis....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/republicans-impeachment-trump-richard-wolffe

Andrea Mazzarino, How War Targets the Young


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