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