“How in the world can these senators walk around here upright when they have no backbone?” a journalist remarked to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “Fear has a way of bending us,” Brown writes in the New York Times.
During the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump that concluded in acquittal Wednesday, House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff recounted a CBS news report that Republican senators had been warned, “Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.”
Brown writes:
The response from Republicans was immediate and furious. Several groaned and protested and muttered, “Not true.” But pike or no pike, Mr. Schiff had clearly struck a nerve. (In the words of Lizzo: truth hurts.)
“The coward caucus,” Republican political strategist Rick Wilson branded Senate Republicans Wednesday night on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.”
It’s not simply that they like what Trump gives them: tax cuts, conservative judges, relentless assaults on the environment and workers’ rights, Brown explains. As president, Mike Pence would give them those things as well. They stick with Trump because they are afraid of him. Afraid he’ll call them nasty names. Afraid he’ll campaign for a primary challenger. Afraid Fox News will attack them.
I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.
They stop short of explicitly saying that they are afraid. We all want to think that we always stand up for right and fight against wrong. But history does not look kindly on politicians who cannot fathom a fate worse than losing an upcoming election. They might claim fealty to their cause — those tax cuts — but often it’s a simple attachment to power that keeps them captured.
Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins was as Susan Collins as ever. She told Norah O’Donnell of CBS Tuesday that while what Trump did in pressuring Ukraine on the July 25 call was wrong, impeachment had taught Trump “a pretty big lesson.” Collins said, “I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future.”
Asked during a Tuesday luncheon if he’d made any mistakes or would do anything differently, Trump insisted, “It was a perfect call.”
Collins backed away from her Tuesday statement on Wednesday, admitting she shouldn’t have said she believes Trump has learned his lessons. She should have said “hopes.”
Fear has a way of bending us.
The only Republican senator with the courage to vote to convict Trump was Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. Romney spoke of honoring his oath before God in an emotional speech destined for the history books. The New York Times got a jump on historians and printed the speech in full. Romney was the first senator ever to vote to convict a president from his own party. Not to follow what his conscience demands would “expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience,” Romney wrote, adding:
I acknowledge that my verdict will not remove the president from office. The results of this Senate court will, in fact, be appealed to a higher court, the judgment of the American people. Voters will make the final decision, just as the president’s lawyers have implored. My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability believing that my country expected it of me.
“Bravo,” writes the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board. If Trump takes acquittal as a green light for more and perhaps worse crimes, “the senators who winked at his wrongdoing will be co-conspirators.”
Arguments could be made, Josh Marshall writes at TPM, for admitting Trump’s wrongdoing, yet “prudential reasons” constrain voting for his removal. But that’s not what Republicans did. Voting not to hear any witnesses “means you know it is very bad but you have different priorities. You don’t care.”
Romney blemished Trump’s exoneration. Trump will care about that. The Coward Caucus will have to live with it.
Trump’s acquittal by all but one Senate Republicans illuminates a shift towards authoritarianism decades in the making. Conservative demagogue Rush Limbaugh paved the way for Trump the way John the Baptist preceded Jesus. Indeed, Trump is for his apostate evangelical base a corrupt, earthier version of their king. The wrathful idol once dwelled above Fifth Avenue in halls of gold. He descended a golden escalator as their protector and savior. Limbaugh received a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday for his years of service as the king’s herald during Trump’s State of the Union pageant.
Many evangelical and conservative politicians have for years practiced their religious and civic faiths more in form than in substance. They have crafted a new god, as Aaron did in the desert, an unholy amalgam of Jesus Christ, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger. In Trump, they brought this golden golem to life. Form without soul.
I attended what was decades ago a Baptist university. Drinking on campus was verboten. So, it was a shock one night to see cases of champagne and racks of champagne glasses staged in the dining hall kitchen for a scheduled trustees’ dinner. I removed one bottle from an open case. Dimpled bottom. Wired cork. Foiled top. The label read “Sparkling Catawba.” Nonalcoholic. A fake.
They planned a champagne toast without champagne. All the external form. All the ritual. Even the effervescence. But empty of substance.
That is how Real Americans™ now practice their faith in the Constitution and show devotion to this democratic republic. The Coward Caucus may regret it sooner rather than later. The king’s vengeance is already on display.
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