Afraid for the future of the country
Donald Trump is going to be impeached.
This now appears inevitable. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was correct when she said several months ago the president, apparently unconstrained by convention, law, or common sense, was on a path to impeach himself.
Trump’s attempt to stick up Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky over a publicly-declared investigation of former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter for bogus crimes, in exchange for military assistance, was too much for Democrats, already traumatized by CIA-confirmed Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Last week’s closed door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee of a veteran U.S. diplomat with first hand knowledge of the administration’s Ukraine machinations seemed to put the nail in the coffin of impeachment, though, who knows, reversals may come, bigger bombshells may yet detonate.
The Ukrainians wanted and needed the $391 million aid package Congress approved for their fight against Russian proxies (the Russians seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and has sponsored military operations against the Ukrainian government ever since).
The president, purse strings firmly in hand, insisted during a July 25 phone call – a partial transcript of which was released by the White House – that Zelensky should “do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot… Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
Our ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor Jr., a West Point grad whose diplomatic career goes back to the Reagan years, made clear to the Democrats and Republicans on the panel his impression that the president’s aim was to feather in his own political nest at the expense of the Ukrainians as well as U.S. national security.
Thus, the nation arrives at a critical juncture: possible impeachment by the House of a president who is fervently loved and just as fervently loathed – a president who immodestly refers to himself as a “stable genius” and who calls critics in his own party “scum”- a president who, it is clear, identifies with authoritarians around the globe, from Putin of Russia to Duterte of the Philippines – a president, both inviting and repellent (it depends on your perspective), who insists on dividing Americans by race, region and religion – a president viewed by some as a God-send and by others as a would-be tyrant, a man who considers himself above the law and beyond the reach of traditional American politics.
There was a taste of what the nation might be up against on Wednesday of last week when a score or so House Republicans stormed the secure room in the Capitol where Intelligence Committee members, Democrats and Republicans alike, were about to hear from a Defense Department official about the Ukraine mess.
Amped by a visit to the White House the night before, where Trump urged members of the House Freedom Caucus to get “tough” with his foes, the Republican firebrands staged a “dramatic escalation” of opposition to the impeachment inquiry. The day’s events were both “bizarre” and “theatrical,” according to reporting in the Washington Post.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham opined, “This is nuts. They’re making a run on the (House secure room). That’s not the way to do it.”
Before busting through the secure room doors, the number two man in the GOP House leadership, Steve Scalise, proclaimed that the hearing going on inside was “a Soviet style process … that should not be allowed in the United States of America.”
The sergeant-at-arms was called. The hearing, lawful in every way, was suspended for five hours.
Later that night, on television, Yale historian Joanne Freeman, the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and The Road to the Civil War, refused to label the scene a “stunt,” as so many already had.
She reminded MSNBC’s Brian Williams that these were men and women high in the American government, lawmakers, “people within the institution of Congress disrupting the congressional process…. It is concerning, not yet alarming, but concerning.”
In May 1856, five years before the Civil War, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was attacked and beaten senseless on the Senate floor by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Brooks became a hero throughout the South while Sumner’s empty Senate seat fortified Northern opposition to slavery.
“The two regions (of the country) could no longer comprehend each other,” according to the historian Herbert Agar.
Today, two political cultures eye one another with deep suspicion.
Prior to pushing past police to enter the secure room, Georgia congressmen Earl “Buddy” Carter stepped to the mic. “You need to be scared,” he said, directing his fury at the impeachment inquiry going on inside. “You need to be very scared. “
We are getting there.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.