America: The Stakes
(This essay was not inspired by a suggestion. This essay was inspired by the dark time America is currently going through, and the question of whether or not our democracy will survive it.)
As I type this, the Senate “trial” of President Donald J. Trump is coming to an end. Virtually no Republican Senators will vote for there to be witnesses in the trial, and without witnesses, it looks like it may all be over today. What kind of trial does not call witnesses, you ask? The only honest answer is a sham trial.
We know that John Bolton, as well as others, have first hand accounts of Trump’s crimes ready to go. But the Republicans refuse to hear them. The Republicans, almost uniformly, have abandoned their duty to defend the Constitution. The Republican party has become the party of winning at all cost, with little regard for what they actually stand for. It really doesn’t matter to them what harm they do, so long as the majority of people in government have a little “R” next to their name. Frustratingly, they still feel that falling in lock step with our Criminal in Chief is the best way to do that.
People will say this is all due to Trump — that Trump showed up, and led the Grand Old Party down a dark path. This is nonsense. Donald Trump is the perfect culmination of what the Republican Party has been becoming for decades. They finally just have a dumbo they can manipulate. They don’t care about fairness, or what’s right, or working together. They literally bullied President Obama out of his legal right to fill Judge Scalia’s spot on the Supreme Court. That was illegal for them to do, but we let them do it. And now we’re paying for it.
The age of reasoning with the opposition is over. Reaching across the aisle is a thing of the past. The current batch of Republicans has shown time and again that their only concern is amassing their own wealth and power at any cost. Shame does not work on them, so they don’t care about their own hypocrisy. Satire doesn’t work either, as they just plain don’t understand it.
The argument that Alan Dershowitz and his thugs are making now is that a president cannot be removed from office, if that president believes that what they are doing is for the good of the country. Which is to say that Trump blackmailing a foreign power into announcing an investigation of a political rival is okay, because a Trump reelection would be for the public good. What complete bullshit.
Nixon would not have quit under the threat of removal if that had always been the argument. He would have just said “I ordered the break-in at the Watergate hotel for the good of country.” And Nixon’s crimes were far less than Trump’s. Nixon never sought the aid of a foreign government. Refusing to remove Trump from office now is tantamount to saying that no future president can be removed from office no matter their crimes, so long as they say it was in the public interest. This sets a horrific precedent. No future president, including Donald Trump, will ever have to fear answering for their actions again. It will be impossible to hold the Executive Branch accountable for anything. Future presidents will be able to do whatever the fuck they want, no matter how awful, and they will be able to do it without fear of consequence. This is the beginning of a dictatorship, plain and simple.
At this point, the only defense against fascism is the ballot box…while it lasts. If we don’t use it, we lose it. The only possible check we have left to put on this president, and indeed, any future president, is to make sure that Donald Trump, and as many of his Republican accomplices as possible, are voted out of office in November. We need to so overwhelm the polls that the very idea of being a modern day Republican is political suicide. We need to get new voters on board, protect everyone’s right to vote, and TURN OUT.
It should go without saying that we have to “vote blue not matter who” in the general election, even if you don’t like the candidate. Nobody protest votes, and nobody sits this one out. The stakes are too high. Even if you think the outcome doesn’t affect you personally, you need to consider how the outcome will affect the most vulnerable among us. Because that’s what society does. That’s why government exists. We take care of each other.
That said, we need to make sure that the democratic leaders we select in our primaries, the leaders we rally behind, actually understand the reality we are now in. As I said before, the era of reaching across the aisle is over, at least for now. We need leaders who will be unrelenting in their fight for what’s right, because these Republicans aren’t going to compromise. They’ve already learned that they don’t have to. It’s time to fight for what we actually want, and not just what we think we can get. The Republicans will oppose us either way. The people of America are much more liberal than many realize. Let’s be active. Let’s show the Republicans that there’s more of us than them. In my view, it’s the only way our democracy survives.
