Finding the Way Forward.....

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As the hearings came to an end last week, we all realized that we had been holding our collective breaths, and so we slowly exhaled and tried to figure out where we were going next.  To many of us, it was so clear that the evidence was there to impeach, and yet, here were the Republicans who simply refused to evaluate the evidence.  Even though their faulty defenses crumbled day after day as the testimonies shattered them, apparently all Republicans simply ignored the facts as presented in the testimonies.

It is clear that Trump’s supporters are fighting a political battle and the Democrats are fighting a legal battle.  There simply is no intersection between the two points of view.  But more than that, the attitude and aggressive attack tactics during questioning revealed the Republican’s bias.  Any type of inquiry of this type should be approached by all parties as a somber exercise in trying to uncover the truth. 

Instead what we got from Nunes and Jordan and all the rest was character assassination, devaluing and undermining of a whole roster of patriotic State Department employees, and promotion of fallacious conspiracy theories without presentation of any evidence.  The Republicans were simply mean!  There was no interest in finding out what really happened.

Make no mistake, what is at stake here is nothing less than the future of our democracy.  The Republicans in Congress apparently endorse obstruction of legal requests for documents and the testimony of key figures who have first-hand information as to the facts of the case against President Trump  .  Moreover, they are endorsing the ignoring of constitutional mandates to obey subpoenas issued by Congress in its constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities.  If that is allowed to stand, then there is no oversight of the Executive Branch.  That means that that responsibility of Congress is nullified and the Constitution of the United States is nullified.  That is a bad thing.  That is why this exercise is important to complete.

To return to the question of what happens next, we must keep the preceding notion in mind.  The Democrats, and more specifically the House of Representatives, need to proceed to present Articles of Impeachment if the House has evidence of High Crimes, Treason or Misdemeanors.  To abandon this process at this point is to surrender the Constitutional right to oversight, which then makes the occurrence of these types of behaviors by the President more likely to continue by this President and future Presidents.  It also rejects the concept of the rule of law and deconstructs the US Constitution.

And more to the point, it needs to be on the record that this man was impeached for innumerable reasons.  He needs to be ‘stained’ with this badge of impeachable wrongdoing so as to mitigate what will surely be his claims of total exoneration when he is most probably acquitted by the Senate.  There will not be much else the majority of us can do.

Then we must steel ourselves for the difficult and perilous path to election day in November 2020.  That will most assuredly be the last chance to reverse the course that Trumpism has set us on since 2015 when he announced his candidacy.  The majority of Americans must coalesce into a force of rejection to sweep Trump and his sycophantic supporters from the scene so we can restore rationality and the rule of law to the United States.

 

And, it will be a prolonged period of restoration and reconstruction from the pervasive damage he and his advocates have wrought upon our Republic.