At the time this is posted, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Leadership Team are yet to forward to the Senate the two Articles of Impeachment against President Trump passed by the House in December. Reports indicate that she has been holding the Articles in an attempt to pressure Republican Senate Majority Leader, U.S. KY Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Mr. McConnell’s Republican Leadership Team, to conduct a meaningful trial of the Articles in the Senate. As the parties bandy back and forth regarding the framework of the upcoming procedure, several impressions emerge:

The President and his supporters persist in calling impeachment a “coup” – short for coup d’etat. It isn’t. My trusty American Heritage Dictionary defines the term – originally French for “stroke of state,” as, “A sudden stroke of state policy involving deliberate violation of constitutional forms by a group of persons in authority [Emphasis added].” By my count, the Constitution refers to impeachment proceedings in five places: Article I, Sections 2 and 3; Article II, Sections 2 and 4; and Article III, Section 2. Whether or not one believes that the President’s imposition upon a vulnerable and reliant foreign ally for assistance against a domestic political rival constituted an offense sufficient to warrant his removal from office under Article II, Section 4, the House impeachment proceedings, which followed the Constitution’s outlines, have in no way constituted a “coup” (nor did the House’s 1998 impeachment of President Clinton). Even though the President’s acolytes are willing to ignore his flouting of his constitutional constraints, I wish that they would at least have the grace not to misrepresent the meaning of a commonly-used English term [even if it is originally French ;)].

The President and his supporters persist in claiming that the impeachment proceedings are intended to “reverse the result of the 2016 election,” “take away the votes of 63 million people,” etc., etc. Again, no matter what one thinks of the weight and merits of the charges against Mr. Trump, this is poppycock [or, as former Vice President Joe Biden might say: malarkey ;)]. By providing for the concept of impeachment in the Constitution, the Founders contemplated that duly-elected officials might behave sufficiently inappropriately to justify their removals from office. If Mr. Trump is removed following the Senate impeachment trial, his successor will not be the 2016 Democratic Party Presidential nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; obviously, it will be Vice President Mike Pence. The 63 million people whose votes the Republicans claim would be forfeited if the Senate convicts Mr. Trump voted for Mr. Pence, too; presumably they believed that Mr. Pence would represent them well if, for whatever reason, Mr. Trump could no longer continue as President.

Putting aside these unfounded oratory flailings by the President and his cohort, to me their most insidious claim is their insinuation that those that support Mr. Trump’s removal from office “don’t like” the President’s supporters. In an October, 2019, piece entitled, “Impeaching Trump Voters,” conservative Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn wrote, in part, the following:

“So why the rush [to proceed with impeachment]? Maybe … there’s an itch to punish Trump voters for what they did in 2016. In other words, it isn’t enough that Mr. Trump be defeated. His whole presidency must be delegitimized, along with the people who voted him in. … [I]t doesn’t seem to occur to Democrats that the president’s supporters stick with him in part because they appreciate that the Trump hatred is directed at them as well. [Emphasis Added].”

During the House impeachment proceedings, U.S. OH Rep. Jim Jordan said the following:

“It’s not just … [the Democrats] don’t like the President. … They don’t like us. They don’t like the 63 million people who voted for this President. All of us in flyover country. All of us common folk in Ohio, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Texas — they don’t like us. … That’s what this is about. They don’t like the President. They don’t like the President’s supporters. And they don’t like us so much that they’re willing to weaponize the government. … Going after 63 million people and the guy we put in the White House. …”

Claims such as those leveled by Messrs. McGurn and Jordan are malignant calumny designed to exploit Trump supporters for Republican political advantage. Since there is no indication that Russia manipulated actual 2016 presidential vote totals and Special Counsel Robert Mueller found insufficient evidence to show that the 2016 Trump Campaign conspired with the Russian Government to elect Mr. Trump, I consider Mr. Trump to have validly won the presidency under our Constitution’s Electoral College framework. He – not unlike U.S. VT Sen. Bernie Sanders — provided a voice for millions of well-intended people who for decades have felt impugned and ignored by the comfortable elites of both parties. Mr. Jordan alluded to Trump supporters in my own state of Wisconsin; from our own travels, I would add to his list well-intended Trump supporters we have met in Utah, Missouri, and Alaska. One can have affection and affinity for well-intended Trump supporters and still believe that the President should be removed because he exploited the power of the presidency for his own personal advantage (as noted earlier in these pages, reading the Call Manuscript — as the President urged — was enough for me). Mr. Trump’s defenders are seeking to distract and incite his followers specifically because no substantive defense can be mounted regarding the President’s actions. Their behavior is execrable.

And we haven’t even gotten to the Lord or Mr. Rogers. That in Part II of this note.

Today, a majority of the members of the House of Representatives is expected to pass at least one Article of Impeachment against President Trump related to a series of events that includes a call in which the President of the United States asked the leader of a dependent and vulnerable foreign ally to investigate another American, one of his electoral rivals. It is anticipated that the vast majority of the Representatives affiliated with the Democratic Party – the party of progressives, liberals, socialists, and other unreliables — will vote for the Articles. It is further anticipated that not one House member affiliated with the Republican Party – the party of avowed conservatives, proclaimed strict constructionists, and staunch defenders of the cultural mores that have made America great — will support the Articles.

The Englishman Edmund Burke is considered one of the founding fathers of modern conservative thought – a philosophy which embraces social order and the belief that reliance upon traditional institutions, community, and customs is the best way for a society to advance itself. In 1790, Mr. Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“[T]he steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental policy are perfectly intelligible and perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name or under any title, in the state. …. [T]he House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other and with all those who derive any serious interest under their entanglements … Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force.”

Addressing his constituents in the city of Bristol, Mr. Burke once declared:

“[A representative’s] unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

No one can be so naïve as to believe that if Mr. Trump was a Democrat, the Democratic Representatives would be so steadfastly voting to impeach him. Even so, since the substance of the interactions between Mr. Trump, his cohort, and Ukrainian officials is undisputed, if the House vote unfolds today as anticipated, which party, according to Mr. Burke’s precepts, should be considered the more conservative?

“Our Crazy, Do Nothing … Speaker of the House, Nervous Nancy Pelosi … suggested … that I testify about the phony Impeachment Witch Hunt. She also said I could do it in writing. Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!”

• Tweet by President Donald J. Trump, November 18, 2019

It is universally expected that this week, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives will approve Articles of Impeachment against President Trump and send them to the Republican-controlled Senate for an Impeachment trial, where it is equally universally expected that he will be acquitted. Where reports differ is whether the Republicans will elect to conduct a streamlined trial involving little new evidence or have an extended proceeding. There are reports that the White House would like a reality show extravaganza involving witnesses such as former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, to testify regarding their activities in Ukraine during the Obama Administration. As a counter, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has written a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, requesting that the Senate call former National Security Advisor John Bolton and Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. [If I ever had a shred of sympathy for Mr. McConnell, it would be now. ;)]

Assume that, as we have been told and despite the Republicans’ loud protestations to the contrary, Joe Biden did nothing inappropriate in executing his role on U.S. Ukraine policy during the Obama Administration and that Hunter Biden did nothing illegal (although smarmy) in joining or serving on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

If I was advising Mr. Biden today, I would suggest that he consider calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mr. Schumer, talking to them alone – the phones in their ears, none of their staffers in the loop – and indicating that he would be willing to go to the podium as soon as the Articles of Impeachment pass the House and state: if the Republicans want him to testify at the President’s Senate impeachment trial, he is willing to come, without need of subpoena and waiving any right to claim his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and other rights and privileges, to testify publicly about his Ukraine activities … provided that President Trump also publicly testifies at the Senate trial about all of his activities related to Ukraine [put a time frame around it, to protect current Ukraine-related discussions] on the same basis and with the same waivers. In the statement, Mr. Biden would ask to be given access to all government documents relating to his Ukraine activities to refresh his recollection, in the same way as the President would undoubtedly review documents to refresh his recollection. He would conclude his statement: the President said he would consider testifying in the impeachment proceedings … it’s time for him to man up.

If I was Ms. Pelosi or Mr. Schumer, the questions would be: Have the House impeachment proceedings created sufficient misgivings within the persuadable segment of the electorate that although the President is going to be acquitted in the Senate, they’ll prevail in the election – making Mr. Biden’s overture risky? Or are they concerned enough that the President will be able to spin his Senate acquittal into an “exoneration” such an overture by Mr. Biden would be a way to put Mr. Trump in a precarious, and perhaps no-win, position?

If the above assumptions about the Bidens are accurate, the advantages of the strategy for Mr. Biden (and in some ways, for the Democrats) are obvious: it elevates him to the presidential level against Mr. Trump, triggering a Democratic tribal instinct and essentially reducing his Democratic presidential nomination adversaries to a band of dwarfs; whether or not Mr. Biden testifies, it will raise doubts among even vehement Trump supporters as to whether he did anything wrong; it will leave all Americans with the impression that if Mr. Biden and/or his son are subpoenaed by the Republican-controlled Senate without a corresponding appearance by Mr. Trump and perhaps key Trump aides, the Republicans are unfair whitewashers; if Mr. Trump doesn’t testify – no matter what excuse he gives — he will look weak (and spawn endless Democratic ads declaring that he wasn’t man enough to face Mr. Biden); and if he does testify, he’ll most probably perjure himself in a manner that can be readily detected. An added bonus: with the possible exception of Trump Personal Lawyer Rudy Giuliani, any other high-ranking Trump Administration official called to testify – Messrs. Bolton and Mulvaney, or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — will almost certainly testify truthfully, because like Amb. Gordon Sondland, the witness won’t want to risk going to jail for perjury.

For Mr. Biden, the disadvantages – even if the introductory assumptions about the Bidens are accurate — are equally obvious: one illusory, one real. The illusory first: can Mr. Biden handle the Senate Republicans’ grilling? Will he wobble too much? If he can’t, he’s no longer up to the presidency. The real disadvantage: The Republicans would undoubtedly call Hunter to testify; even if the Democrats are successful in getting the Republicans to produce a high-ranking Administration official in return, how would Hunter fare? Even if he hasn’t done anything illegal, he’s not a public performer; can he handle the grilling? Republicans will wish to delve into parts of his background which, like his Ukrainian experience, are somewhat unsavory; can he be sufficiently prepared, through grilling by the nastiest Democrats, before he actually testifies? Does the senior Biden want to put him through that? Is the presidency worth that to him? At the same time: How likely is it that Hunter will end up testifying at the Senate trial anyway? If it’s likely, wouldn’t it be better to grab the high ground?

Now is the time to decide; if the Republicans announce that they are going to conduct an extended process and call the Bidens as witnesses, Mr. Biden has lost the edge.

How do the parties like the hands they hold? Does either want to raise the ante?

Below is a link to a Rolling Stone article recently given me by a close friend, describing the genesis and evolution of the Christian Right’s support of President Trump. The author, Alex Morris, comes from an Alabama Evangelical family.  I found the article both insightful and poignant. While describing the bases of the Christian Right leadership’s rabid allegiance to Mr. Trump in stark terms, Mr. Morris also provides a helpful and sympathetic description of those of our people, including members of his family, who sincerely hold their views. Among his observations:

“I’m [in Alabama] to speak with my family about Trump, though I don’t relish the prospect. Like so many in America, I watched their conversion to him happen slowly, grow from bemusement to grudging support, then to wholehearted acceptance, and then to fervor. In many ways, I was sensitive to the way they — and their thinking — were being portrayed in the media. But that’s not why I don’t want to talk to them about it. I don’t want to talk to them about it because I don’t want them to fear for my soul.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/christian-right-worships-donald-trump-915381/

Two unrelated — or perhaps in one respect, not so unrelated — impressions arising from the week’s events …

I suggested not long ago that I suspected that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s goal in instituting impeachment proceedings is — through the continual drip of incriminating information about President Trump and his agents and without regard to the outcome of the inevitable Senate trial — to politically weaken the President with that small (but likely electorally decisive) segment of voters who aren’t already irrevocably committed to or against him. (This goal being in addition to the most important: that Mr. Trump’s undisputed interaction with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy constituted an abuse of power sufficient to warrant his removal from office.) Some opine that the hearings won’t change any minds. I disagree. While the testimony of State Department Officials William Taylor and George Kent perhaps merely reinforced the pre-existing impressions of the voters following the proceedings, I thought Friday’s testimony by Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine that Mr. Trump summarily dismissed after she was shamelessly smeared by his agent, Rudy Giuliani, and whom Mr. Trump himself maligned during his July 25 phone call with Mr. Zelenskyy … was, politically, devastatingly effective. Although the President’s Republican House defenders were technically correct that Amb. Yovanovitch, having been removed months before the Presidents’ July call, had little to add to the crux of the Democrats’ central impeachment allegations (although her testimony did demonstrate a pattern of behavior by the President’s agents to pursue his interests above the nation’s), her controlled but obviously distraught (at times, you could see her eyes glisten) description of the way she was driven out of her post by bullies when she had done nothing wrong, her career irreparably changed and leaving her and her family emotionally abused – was, in my view, a damning account. Mr. Trump is already relatively weaker with women, our majority voting segment. If the Democrats can’t develop 2020 campaign ads — depicting the President’s live tweet during the hearing, “Everywhere Marie Yavonovitch went turned bad,” and Ms. Yovanovitch’s visibly distressed reaction — that will viscerally resonate with those Republican and Independent women in swing states who are already uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s selfish bullyboy tactics, they don’t deserve to win the election. I would submit that Ms. Pelosi’s percolating Election Day brew got a notable boost in flavor this week.

Years and years ago, due to his support of legislation that would be very beneficial to my organization’s primary customers, I gave a very small personal contribution to a campaign of Republican U.S. IA Sen. Chuck Grassley. My reward for that contribution was being placed on Sen. Grassley’s contributors list. For years, I received his solicitations, which I tossed. I was finally moved to write Mr. Grassley — in an appropriate tone 😉 – taking issue with his partisanship and positions. The Senator did not thereafter cease the behavior that concerned me; he did, however, seemingly take me off his mailing list.

Until this week. Perhaps through a glitch in the Republican National Committee’s direct mail systems, I got a letter from Sen. Grassley, asking me to contribute – not to his campaign, but to that of … U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Mr. Grassley declares how Mr. McConnell “… as Senate Majority Leader … is showing everyone that he’ll stand strongly in the face of a radical Democratic Party that is embracing socialism and is rabidly obsessed with destroying President Trump …. [Democrats will] spend millions of dollars smearing Senator McConnell with reckless, false attacks …. [U]ltra-rich leftists, radical environmentalists, anti-gun activists, pro-abortion supporters, coastal elites, and a nationwide army of angry liberals will do whatever it takes to try to defeat President Trump…. [If Mr. McConnell] is defeated in Kentucky … there [will] be another liberal in the Senate taking marching orders from Chuck Schumer …. That is why I am asking you to support Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign. It’s important for Iowa, and for all of America, for him to continue leading Republicans in the Senate.”

I’ve never received a Democratic solicitation; I suspect that they are similarly full of inflammatory hyperbole. It did occur to me how seemingly odd it was for Sen. McConnell to be reaching all the way into the Midwest for support in a race that he should handily win in a strongly red state. It brought to mind comments I’ve heard in recent months from a close friend located much closer to the Bluegrass State than I am, who asserts that Mr. McConnell can be beaten by the Kentucky Democrats’ leading Senate candidate, Amy McGrath, a 20-year Lt. Col. Marine fighter pilot. By the looks of this solicitation, Mr. McConnell agrees with our friend. Mr. McConnell’s stout support of a President who appears to enjoy intimidating women may not serve him so well if he’s up against a 20-year celebrated female Marine …

A friend and I were perched on stools at a table in the darkish far corner of a Wisconsin tavern located outside the Madison liberal bubble. The rest of the customers were sitting at the bar enjoying a refresher after a long day on the job – made harder by the unusual cold that had gripped the state. Our conversation had – not atypical of my conversations 😉 – turned to politics. Even so, we were talking in low tones, and the specific topic was not an emotive one – the psychological moral foundations Jonathan Haidt lists in The Righteous Mind, and Mr. Haidt’s description of how liberals’ and conservatives’ gut instincts give respectively different weights to what are all indisputably worthy values. At least I was only vaguely aware that a man had started playing a video game within a few feet of us. Having apparently heard at least part of our conversation, he approached our table – mid-30’s, Caucasian, dark longish beard, not large in stature, stocking cap on his head pulled down almost to his eyebrows — pardoned himself for interrupting, and, not at all aggressively, proceeded on what was a fairly long monologue — his frustration and resentment evident although his tone was even – about what his life was like: married with a child, how he and his wife both worked, how he had gone to school and worked for a couple of companies before starting his own business, how he had thousands of dollars’ worth of tools in his truck but couldn’t get ahead. His friends in the trades felt the same way.  “Child care costs so much.” “I’d be better off working for $7.50 an hour – then I’d get assistance. They get assistance. I get nothing.” “The older generation doesn’t get it – they could get ahead by working hard. We can’t.” “The middle class is dead — there is no more middle class.” “Social security is there for you [no offense intended or taken; I am obviously of Social Security-eligible age 😉 ] — do you think it’s going to be there for me? [Rhetorical – clearly he thinks not].”

While we – at least I – will probably never be able to viscerally feel the indignation this gentleman feels, my friend and I have sympathy for what he and so many Americans are facing, and he could see that; our tones remained even, as they should have – Americans civilly exchanging contrasting viewpoints. My friend ventured: Was he for Trump? “Trump all the way,” he replied. Mr. Trump wasn’t perfect, but finally, someone was taking on China, somebody was trying to bring back the middle class. I indicated that at least one of his concerns – Social Security – could be fixed if the politicians got their heads together; he respectfully waved that off. I asked what he thought of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate with the seemingly widest working class appeal. “He’s just in it to put money in his pocket. That’s what all politicians do – just put money in their pockets.”

I’ve probably mentioned The Righteous Mind in these pages more than any other book I’ve read since retiring. Since it seems so blatantly obvious to me that President Trump is a self-interested blackguard willing to sacrifice national interests for his own while doing nothing to objectively better the circumstances of those who most fervently believe in him (caveat: he has well served anti-abortionists by packing the federal courts with young conservative judges), I have increasingly reflected upon why approximately 40% of my fellow citizens feel so vehemently differently than I think they should feel about the President. Putting aside the bigots, I reject the notion that the vast majority of the President’s supporters are “deplorable.” They are not stupid. So what is it? Is it gut resistance to the country’s inevitable technological and demographic change? Antipathy to cultural change – a longing for a time when – to quote Carroll O’Connor’s and Jean Stapleton’s Archie and Edith Bunker – “Girls were girls and men were men” and we “Didn’t need no welfare state; everybody pulled his weight”? Resentment at obviously condescending intellectuals? Outrage at the disparagement of religious faith that many of them (and I) consider central to our beings? A lack of hope born of the realization that they’re too many touchdowns behind to catch up no matter how hard they work? A product of propaganda – one turns to sources with which one is most comfortable, and Fox News commentators and alt-right social media outlets, driven by profit, have given them tangible targets to blame?

Probably all of the above. Clearly many of our people have been overtaken by despair. Despite all of his transparent bluster and lying, a segment see the President “telling it like it is” – that he’s given voice to their anger that they’ve been betrayed by the educated and affluent class that they trusted to lead the nation. Judging by President Obama’s electoral majorities, many of them believed in him, but as uncomfortable as it is for some progressives to acknowledge, Mr. Obama did little to help them. Mr. Trump at least provides the impression that he hears them together with the satisfaction of sticking it in the eye of the snobs who have undeniable disdain for them.

These divisions are deep. In its retrospective on President Ronald Reagan at the time of Mr. Reagan’s death, Newsweek stated, “[At the time Mr. Reagan became President] [s]erious people began to wonder whether the presidency was too big a job for any one [person].” One cannot help but ponder how any one person can adequately address the sharp divisions and diverse challenges we have today.

It had reached the hour my friend and I had planned to part. We rose from our bar stools, stood. I said to the young gentleman who had engaged us – gently, because we had had a completely amicable exchange, and I had benefited much more from our talk than he had — “I fear that you’re placing your faith in a mirage.”

“I base it on facts”, he replied with assurance, but without rancor. I didn’t ask from whom he gets his facts. It was time to go. It was dark outside, and unseasonably cold.