Tagged: Vote to impeach

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.

 

Op-Ed

Open Letter To Senator Lamar Alexander Regarding His Vote Not To Impeach

(Letter to the Knoxville News Sentinel, 10 February 2020, which as usual was not published even though similar letters by others were published before and after I submitted this)

(This is an open letter to Senator Lamar Alexander.) Regarding your votes not to allow more witnesses at the impeachment hearings and not to impeach President Trump:  Sir, you are a moral coward.

Many important actors had not been interviewed during the House inquiry, but you didn’t think any witnesses needed to be heard or questioned by senators. Your reason for not voting to impeach was that although you recognized that Trump had actually done what he was accused of, you did not think that it was an impeachable offense. Trump’s using the power of his office for his own personal political gain, against the interests of the United States and its promises to its ally, Ukraine, was not impeachable?

You said, “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution clearly provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election.” No, the Constitution clearly provides for impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate. So to cast this as a decision that the American people and not Congress should make is ludicrous.

This statement is consistent with your whole career in public service. Over and over, in whatever capacity you happened to be working in (governor, president of UT, senator, and especially presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000), when presented with a knotty decision that some influential group wanted you to make to their benefit you would natter on about objectivity, fairness, and doing what was best for everybody. But then, often at the last minute, you would come down on the side that everybody knew you would all along, i.e., that of the special interest or political favor-giver. Clearly you did this in the case of the impeachment trial.

You are not running for reelection and you could well have voted your conscience. That is, if you had one.