Methinks He Talketh Too Much

I believe that a fair number of you are like me, and can’t wait to see Donald J. Trump receive the hell-and-damnation business end of some karmic justice. The gods of consequence reaching down and slapping him for his lifetime of deceit, greed and arrogance towards the law.

Maybe like me, you thought the Orange Tornado would suffer some slings and arrows from the Mueller investigation, when DJT himself told others, “I’m fucked.” Or his first impeachment for gross abuse of power. Like a mobster he wanted to make a sordid deal: before Ukraine gets cash for military funding to fight, ironically, for a nation’s own law-abiding democracy, Kyiv must dig up dirt on the Bidens. Trump wanted slimy political advantage the Roy Cohn way. As we know, Donnie shows scant constraint and likes to talk, and his White House phone records, plus those officials whose duty was to listen in, laid bare the facts. He should have been convicted; he escaped.

He didn’t take his 2020 re-election loss well, which might be my greatest understatement. Convinced of the power of the repeated lie, he saddled up his horse to spread the word. A rigged, stolen election. His horse trampled truth and the public’s trust of once-revered institutions. He whipped his racehorse, named ‘Riggo,’ into a foaming frenzy that crossed the line at the Jan 6th insurrection. That impeachment didn’t work either.

Maybe he’d get caught and punished as additional detailed reporting came in of his unending stream of scandals, lawlessness, and clumsy incompetence with an emphasis on grift management. Trump set his presidency well apart as the worst in history. No president has ever been indicted for so many serious crimes, including insurrection, Espionage Act violations and many other felonies for which even a smattering of convictions would mean the remainder of his life in prison. This guy who took a Presidential Oath.

Justice has taken SO long, but Jennifer Rubin’s essay really makes my day, tells me the end is finally near.

What did Churchill say in 1942, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Donald Trump’s Impeachment

Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses on Wednesday, January 6th, and for this he must be punished. It’s called for by the Constitution when the president commits “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Choices are:

1. 25th Amendment, but that won’t work because Vice President Mike Pence is a coward.
2. Censure, which is a lame slap on the wrist.
3. Impeachment
4. Do nothing.

Choices 1, 2 & 4 are unacceptable, leaving impeachment. Trump is only the 3rd president to have already suffered this permanent ignominy; he would be the first POTUS to be impeached twice, a screamingly large and indelible stain on his legacy, such as it is. He was stung by his first impeachment, and a second would deliver a more severe sting, a murder hornet sting well-deserved for his seditious actions that incited a violent mob to storm and desecrate the Capitol in hopes of overturning a free and fair election.

The impeachment process is like the two-part KA-CHUNK of a shotgun. The “KA” part is like an indictment: the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, accuses the president of terrible misdeeds, which may or may not be crimes. The “CHUNK” part is like a court trial: the upper chamber of Congress, the Senate, weighs evidence and decides if the president is guilty or not, as if Senators were both judge and jury. If found guilty, that constitutes conviction, and the president is right then and there removed from office, and is no longer POTUS. (The vice president then becomes president.) Trump should have been convicted and removed the first time, but the Senate was controlled by Republicans, who had been pistol-whipped into submission; the cowards, whimpering in fear, did not execute their Constitutional duty.

With a paltry nine days left in his administration, there is not time to perform the full operation of endorsing articles of impeachment in the House, then running a trial in the Senate. But this lack of time need not prevent him from being impeached. There is time for the House, newly inflamed by Trump’s egregious assault on democracy and the separation of powers, to draft and pass one or more articles of impeachment, which as explained above would be a stinging blow, a withering rebuke of this unfit, would-be tyrant.

Once the impeachment articles are passed, he would be the first president in history to be impeached twice. There would not be time to convict him in the Senate, but at least some punishment would have been inflicted. By the time the Senate gets around to holding a trial, perhaps in February or soon after, Trump will no longer be in office. However, a conviction would represent another, perhaps more important layer of punishment, since he would be prevented from holding office in the future. He’s addicted to power, and he harbors a terrible fantasy of being elected to the presidency in 2024, and we can’t let that happen.

He committed grievous acts against our democracy, as surely as did Benedict Arnold, recorded by historians as a traitor. Doing nothing is a terrible option, and Amendment 25 won’t get off the ground, leaving impeachment as the right path. To be twice-impeached labels him permanently as an unfit if not evil specimen of a president, and conviction, even if too late to remove him and prevent him from using his presidential power to do more harm, accomplishes the important goal of sealing him off from a future presidency. Good riddance, Donald.