I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.
Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.
The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.
You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.
Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.
Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.
The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?
We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.
The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.
The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?
To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.
Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.
Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.
It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.
