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Patriot affectations

CNN image capture via YouTube.

“Someone should ask Democrats if they plan to carry on this newfound reverence for the Constitution and Founding Fathers after impeachment is over. I hope so,” Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina tweeted Friday evening. The Raleigh News and Observer reports the retiring Republican congressman is now part of Donald Trump’s quasi-official, eight-member “impeachment team.”

Seeing Republicans conduct themselves during three impeachment proceedings in the last half-century leads to the suspicion that for many since the Reagan years patriotism has become something like teenage boys bragging about sex, an affectation. Those that talk about it the most practice it the least. Men and women who risked their lives for their country in battle and experienced its sights, sounds, and smells up close, and especially their losses rarely discuss it. Jesus admonished disciples not to pray like the hypocrites, “standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”

That advice is lost on Meadows and many of his Republican colleagues. They presume, perhaps, because citizens to their left engage less in public displays of love of country that they love this country less, and that when they do express patriotic feelings publicly they are inauthentic. Perhaps that is because we believe public patriotism — especially theatrical stunts like hugging flags — comes cheap and is worth what it cost. Here, where loud, chest-thumping men drive pickup trucks displaying American flags and Confederate ones side by side, one wonders. Lately, they are as likely to be Trump flags as battle flags once waved by traitors to the republic.

Meadows’s comments likely arose from House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff’s closing speech on Thursday. Quoting from Col. Alex Vindman’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff argued that more than the Constitution is on the line in the Trump impeachment. “Here, right matters,” Schiff began:

Well, let me tell you something, if right doesn’t matter, if right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. Doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is. Doesn’t matter how well written the Oath of Impartiality is. If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost.

If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter.

Trump’s defenders seem committed only to protecting the truth from seeing daylight. It remains doubtful that the Republican Senate majority will allow witnesses to testify in what is supposed to resemble a trial.

Paul Savoy, a former prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, argues in The Atlantic that without witnesses Mitch’s Potemkin court is itself unconstitutional:

… Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in a concurring opinion in Nixon v. United States (1993), a case involving the impeachment of federal Judge Walter Nixon, found in the impeachment-trial clause of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution a limitation on the method by which the Senate can conduct an impeachment proceeding. The text of the clause states, “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” Justice White interpreted the word try to mean that the impeachment proceeding must be in the nature of a judicial trial, and concluded that “a procedure that could not be deemed a trial by reasonable judges” would be unconstitutional.

“The Constitution itself is on trial, not just Donald Trump,” civil rights activist Maya Wiley told MSNBC hosts ahead of House impeachment managers’ Friday afternoon arguments.

Schiff continued soon thereafter, arguing that leaving Trump in place is a threat to national security. In his closing last night, he argued the whole world is watching to see whether the United States still holds true to the ideals it espouses:

“From their prison cells in Turkey, journalists look to us. From their internment camps in China, they look to us. From their cells in Egypt, those who gathered in Tahrir Square for a better life look to us. From the Philippines, those that were the victims and their families of mass extrajudicial killings, they look to us.”

“From all over the world, they look to us. And increasingly, they don’t recognize what they see. It’s a terrible tragedy for them, it’s a worse tragedy for us, because there’s nowhere else for them to turn.”

Trump’s attorneys begin their opening remarks this morning. They will present less a defense of the president’s actions than an all-out attack on his accusers and on the constitutional impeachment process itself. Trump will tolerate nothing less.

Republicans know what Trump did in extorting Ukraine and obstructing Congress violated his oath to the Constitution. They will violate theirs in refusing to hold him to account.

I awoke an hour early this morning dreaming about funeral preparations.

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