I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.
The United States has an impeachment problem. Impeachment was put into a Constitution that made no mention of, allowance for, or plans to survive the existence of political parties. Presidents are now generally not impeached for any abuse or outrage unless there is one party that doesn’t itself engage in that same abuse or outrage and that party is in the majority in the House. The use of a sex scandal for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was part of the process of destroying the impeachment power, but we’re now probably past sex scandals, for better or worse. We’re reduced to obscure or even fictional offenses, or physical attacks on Congress Members. And even those can be impeachable only when the non-presidential party has a House majority. And even then, the same party would have to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate to get a conviction, since a president’s party’s members will do virtually anything a president commands.
This impeachment problem, unless it is solved, effectively means that a popular nonviolent movement to oust a lawless dictator from the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue must turn out the entire government and start over. The reason the proper course is not the one everyone has been conditioned to mindlessly follow, namely waiting for a distant election, is the same reason impeachment was put into the Constitution: some abuses and outrages should never be tolerated. They do too much massive damage, and they set precedents that are very hard to undo. When Bush-Cheney and then Obama were allowed to finish out and not be removed, warmaking became more acceptable than ever, as did warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, murder by missile, etc. Criminal thuggery became firmly a policy choice, not an impeachable or prosecutable offense — unless of course you’re not the president. The top impeachable offenses by Bush are in this list of 35. Partway into the Obama presidency, I documented his continuation of 27 of those 35.
The Trump-Biden-Trump era has iced the cake of acceptable and legalistic monstrosities. In 2019, RootsAction put together a list of 25 articles of impeachment for Trump:
Violation of Constitution on Domestic Emoluments
Violation of Constitution on Foreign Emoluments
Incitement of Violence
Interference With Voting Rights
Discrimination Based On Religion
Illegal War
Illegal Threat of Nuclear War
Abuse of Pardon Power
Obstruction of Justice
Politicizing Prosecutions
Collusion Against the United States with a Foreign Government
Failure to Reasonably Prepare for or Respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria
Separating Children and Infants from Families
Illegally Attempting to Influence an Election
Tax Fraud and Public Misrepresentation
Assaulting Freedom of the Press
Supporting a Coup in Venezuela
Unconstitutional Declaration of Emergency
Instructing Border Patrol to Violate the Law
Refusal to Comply With Subpoenas
Declaration of Emergency Without Basis In Order to Violate the Will of Congress
Illegal Proliferation of Nuclear Technology
Illegally Removing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
Seeking to Use Foreign Governments’ Resources Against Political Rivals
Refusal to Comply with Impeachment Inquiry
One could go on piling up the articles of impeachment or documenting their continuation and expansion. But what’s missing is not the documentation. Here’s a guy who incited violence at his campaign events prior to his first stint on the throne. RootsAction proposed his impeachment for open financial corruption on his first inauguration day. The case was beyond solid, and has been built up ever since. Every weapons shipment for genocide by Biden, Trump, or a harmoniously bipartisan Congress violates numerous U.S. laws. The corruption is gradiose, fantastic, megalithic. The wars, the lies, the kidnappings by masked thugs, the environmental destruction, the promotion of bigotry and hatred — it’s a festival of flagrantly overly justified grounds for removal from office. But what’s missing is the will to make removal happen. On June 24, a huge, happy, bipartisan majority voted not to impeach Trump for making himself a king, just 10 days after huge demonstrations all across the country denouncing Trump for having made himself a king.
I’m afraid of what will happen instead of impeachment. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is nobility in that idea. But there is no such thing as making nonviolent revolution impossible. And the powers of nonviolent action are virtually unknown in U.S. culture. Mildly objecting to mass murdering foreign people is a lot for us. The notion that we might actually learn from the successes of foreign people could be asking too much. And so the vast panoply of options between demanding impeachment and hitting Capitol Police officers with flag poles may be lost on too many of us. It may be lost on us beyond our ability to recognize the absurd insufficiency of choosing between two disastrous candidates every four years. We may realize what a scam this so-called democracy is, but not realize our latent power to take it over without counterproductive violence. That does not bode well.
- First published at DavidSwanson.org.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.