Op-Ed

A Modest Proposal To End Our Current National Nightmare

(I sent the following as a letter to the editor of The Oak Ridger (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) on March 6; they didn’t publish it. Then I sent it to the editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel; they didn’t publish it. Well, this IS Tennessee and anti-Trump sentiments are not welcome, plus the News Sentinel has published very few letters at all since USA Today took over. So I am posting it here. I had the idea in late February that it was not too early to be talking about impeachment of Mr. Trump. I am even more convinced now that we should not wait until the mid-term elections to cancel him from the public scene. I know that some people will say that the House will never impeach Trump, but now, after all the mass firings, the health and safety funding cancellations, the deportation inhumanity, and especially the ruinous tariff regime, I think that critical mass (so to speak) may be reached soon and Congresspeople will see that it’s them or Trump as far as their political survival is concerned. One way this could go: the threatening of law firms and the extraction of concessions from some of them of tens of millions of dollars in pro bono work, not for charity, but for causes that Trump favors as an individual and not as the president, is clearly extortion — it is a protection scheme and it is blackmail. That is a felony, committed during Trump’s term of office, and hence is a clear rationale for impeachment. Washington and Lincoln and Eisenhower must be turning in their graves.)

TEXT OF THE LETTER

Here’s a modest proposal to end our current national nightmare.

  1.  The people should tell their congresspeople vehemently that they want to change back to the status quo ante and go forward from there. They should camp outside the congresspeople’s homes and offices, if necessary, waving signs and singing an appropriate song. (I suggest “The Bells of Hell”.)
  2. Congresspeople (especially Republicans) should immediately grow a backbone (and any other body parts they may be missing).
  3. The House should promptly impeach Trump, Vance, and any other malefactors who have betrayed their oaths of office.
  4. Before the impeachment trial begins, the Speaker and the Senate Leader should be induced to resign on grounds of an attack of conscience. The Senate should then pick a strong leader to conduct the impeachment trial. Meanwhile, the House should pick a new Speaker, someone who – Democrat or Republican – is principled, dynamic, inspirational, and possessed of a lot of common sense.
  5. Once Trump and Vance are removed from office, the new Speaker should become president. He should get to work reversing the executive orders, soothing our allies, comforting Ukraine, bopping Putin, Xi, etc., on the beezer – i.e., doing as much as possible to put things back the way they were before Trump took office.
  6. Meanwhile, Congress should get to work affirming its past spending commitments, evaluating existing and proposed spending, and putting in place measures – say a Constitutional amendment – to ensure that the unitary executive (aka dictator) model cannot be put in place again.
  7. During the next election, the sadder but wiser electorate should make better choices. All candidates should be reminded of the judgments we all face from History and Heaven, since some past candidates didn’t get the memo.
  8. Then we should all get back to cultivating our gardens.