Trump Acquited, a Maureen Dowd Column, and What Ails the Senate

Okay, the Senate has voted to acquit the President of the two charges the House brought to impeach him.  The Senate’s vote chose party loyalty, politics, over truth.  This alerted us to a significant flaw in our system of government which the writers of the Constitution also recognized. 

We had a choice, back in 1789, of having a “parliamentary” form of government, or something else.   The Founding Fathers recognized a major flaw in such a “parliamentary” system of government.   In such an ostentatiously democratic method of letting the elected representatives of the people choose the head of state, they did not provide an avenue of relief, if it turned out they had chosen poorly, other than voting to show they had lost confidence in him or her and wanted to give it another shot.  We see examples of this in the frequent changing of Prime Ministers in many European countries where the Executive is chosen by the Legislature.  In Israel, a deadlocked parliament prevents the replacement or reappointment of their Prime Minister.

True, there are supposed checks on a head of state elected by a single democratically elected parliament.  A monarch might be one, but nowadays, their power is negligible.  Some nations’ “Presidents” are often no more than ceremonial figureheads. A court system might be another, if it manages to retain real independence from the legislature.  

An answer to this would be a second legislature which would act as a check on a democratically elected parliament and its choice as head of state.  The United Kingdom’s “House of Lords” historically filled this role there, but today it wields no real power.

Our Founding Fathers liked that idea of a powerful and less democratically chosen second legislature, the Senate, to balance the potentially more radical actions of the “Peoples’ House" as well as an entirely independent head of state, whose office did not derive from appointment by either legislature. These parameters are carefully laid out in the first two articles of our Constitution and are followed by a third article establishing a Judiciary to be appointed by the Executive and ratified by the Senate.  Impeachment of the Executive was included as a last resort, initiatable in the House and judged by the Senate.

Let’s look at those who elected those who filled these roles established by the first three articles of our Constitution.   This is the key to the workings of our government.

Firstly, the House of Representatives was elected by the people, depending of course, on the laws of the several States regarding who had the right to vote.  So far, so good.

The Senate, a second legislature, was a supposed check on the House of Representatives, and was originally appointed by the State legislatures which usually were less democratically elected than the House because of varying State laws.  Powers were divided between these two bodies.  The House had the “power of the purse,” the job of authorizing spending, initiating legislation, but the Senate had the final say on most Executive appointments, most importantly judges, and most legislation passed by the House.  

In 1913, by virtue of the Seventeenth Amendment, the Senate became “popularly” elected in each State.  This continued the undemocratic strength in that body of less populated States which each had the same voting weight as more populous States, but because it was now directly elected, made it subject to the same political motivation, often unwise in the long run, which governed the House of Representative, and which a less democratic Senate was originally intended to counteract.   Think about that!  The kind of passion and pandering found in the House was now contaminating the Senate.

The purpose of the Senate was thereby ‘corrupted’ by the Seventeenth Amendment, when it became popularly elected.  True, in 2020, it certainly performed as a brake on the actions of the House, but for base political reasons, not Constitutional reasons, although it tried mightily to pretend that was what it was doing.   That's why the Republican Senate ignored the facts and stressed a criticism of the process instead in its impeachment proceedings.  

Finally, election of the Chief Executive was left to an “Electoral College,” with each State having a number of electors equal to their number of Representatives in the House (currently fixed at 435) plus one for each of their Senator, regardless of the States' population.  Of course, this undemocratic composition of the Senate is reflected in the Electoral College. The electors, themselves, are usually honorary positions, but allied to a political party, whose orders they almost always follow. With a few exceptions (two small States divide them proportionately), all of those electoral votes, go to the candidate who gets the majority of votes in a State.  That is how we get to select our president. This is not a democratic way to chose a president and begs to be fixed.

All of this supposedly meshes together and gives the United States a government free from the danger of a one house parliament giving power to someone who is found to be ultimately undeserving.   But everything has to work properly for this to happen, including the impeachment process if it is called into play.  Because a Senate, beholden to a clearly corrupt Executive for voter support, chose politics over honesty, it did not work properly in 2020.  The Senate fell down on its job.   A majority there violated their oaths.  They deserve to be punished.  Only Mitt Romney, of the Republicans, knew that an oath sworn to God (they all intoned the words, "... so help me, God," might be actually heard by the Creator.  They will be punished.  Even supposedly religious politicians like Vice President Pence should know that.  Purgatory awaits.

Try to view the impeachment proceedings of the current President in the light of this complicated scheme the Founding Fathers thought up in 1789.

Solutions:  Do we need a new Constitutional convention?  What Amendments to our Constitution would solve this problem?  

Jack Lippman

Maureen Dowd: Now Trump is unrepentant and unleashed

By Maureen Dowd | The New York Times

  Published: Feb. 1, 2020

Washington • During a meeting with Donald Trump at Trump Tower in June 2016, with the opéra bouffe builder improbably heading toward the nomination despite a skeletal campaign crew on a floor below, I asked when he would pivot.

We all assumed he would have to pivot, that he would have to stop his belittling Twitter rants, that he would have to cease attacking fellow Republicans like John McCain, that he would have to get more in line with the traditional stances of his party, that he would have to be less of a barbarian at the gates of D.C.

He crossed his arms, pursed his lips and shook his head — a child refusing vegetables.

How naive he was, I thought to myself. But I was the naive one. Trump has forced the world to pivot to him.

The state of the union is upside down and inside out and sauerkraut. Trump has changed literally everything in the last three years, transforming and coarsening the game. On Friday night, he became, arguably, the most brutishly powerful Republican of all time. Never has a leader had such a stranglehold on his party, subsuming it with one gulp.

As the Senate voted 51-49 to smother the impeachment inquiry, guided by the dark hand of Mitch McConnell, it felt like the world’s greatest deliberative body had been hollowed out, diminished.

McConnell let Mitt Romney and Susan Collins vote to allow documents and witnesses such as John Bolton, knowing two could strain at the leash safely.

The rest of the senators fell into line as sycophantic clones of Mike Pence. The impeachment trial amounted to one side being earnest and one pretending to be. It was exactly what Nancy Pelosi feared would happen before she was reluctantly drawn into the show trial.

“Now the State of the Union is going to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man coming down the street and standing in the rubble of what’s left of the Congress,” keened one Democrat on Friday night. “The Republican Party has now lost whatever control they could exert over this president, any oversight they could have. It’s gone. The state of the union is there is no union. How can there be when one side is petrified of their Godzilla?”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., dismissed Republicans as “a cult of personality” around Trump.  “This trial in so many ways crystallized the completely diametrically opposed threats that Democrats and Republicans see to the country,” Murphy told Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times. “We perceive Donald Trump and his corruption to be an existential threat to the country. They perceive the deep state and the liberal media to be an existential threat to the country.

“That dichotomy, that contrast, has been growing over the last three years, but this trial really crystallized that difference. We were just speaking different languages, fundamentally different languages when it came to what this trial was about. They thought it was about the deep state and the media conspiracy. We thought it was about the president’s crimes.”

I feel like I have spent my career watching the same depressing dynamic that unspooled Friday night: Democrats trying, sometimes ineptly, to play fair, and Republicans ruthlessly trying to win.

I watched it with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. I watched it in the 2000 recount with Bush versus Gore. I watched it with the push by W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to go to war in Iraq. I watched it with the pantomime of Merrick Garland.

Democrats are warning Republicans that they will be judged harshly by history. But in the meantime, the triumphant Republicans get to make history. And a lot of the history that Republicans have made is frightening: the endless, futile wars, the obliviousness to climate change, the stamp on the judiciary.

As Carl Hulse of The Times writes in his book, “Confirmation Bias,” about the Garland fiasco: “The success in naming judges was the signal achievement of Trump’s first two years. In the coming years, those judges will be among the members of the federal bench called to rule on Trump’s policies and practices in cases arising from challenges initiated by increasingly confrontational Democrats and other legal adversaries around the nation. Mitch McConnell made a snap decision one night in 2016. The consequences will reverberate for decades.”

For hours Friday, the House managers made their vain final arguments. Pressing for Bolton’s testimony, Val Demings implored Republican senators: Aren’t you worried that, if left in office, Trump will harm America’s national security, seek to corrupt the upcoming election and undermine our democracy to further his own personal gain? Don’t you want to hear the witnesses and see the documents that would give the full story and make this a fair trial rather than a mock one?  “This is the American way and this is the American story,” Demings told the Republican senators as they looked back at her, impassive or impatient.

But, of course, they didn’t want that. As he voted against witnesses and documents, Lamar Alexander, McConnell’s pal, said Trump did something inappropriate but they just did not accept that it was impeachable, and they did not want to tear up ballots and “pour gasoline on cultural fires that are burning out there.”

So why not shut it down and cover it up? The books were cooked from the start.

As with so many other pivotal moments in modern history, Republicans wanted to win, not look for the truth. And history, God help us, is written by the winners.

So, what are YOU going to do about it?  Thomas Paine said it many years ago:  "These are the times that try men's souls."

JL