It’s cold comfort this morning, but what are you gonna do? The spin on Saturday’s Senate acquittal will be that, with seven Republicans joining Democrats in voting to convict, the second impeachment trial of Donald John Trump was the most bipartisan in history.
That still means, Dana Milbank writes, the other 43 Republicans, “now have the cowardly distinction of licking the boots of the man who left them to die,” just as the unrefuted account of Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) stated.
Meaning, Senate Republicans look to history like Dinsdale’s victims in Monty Python’s “Piranha Brothers” sketch. They excused the mobster for nailing their heads to the floor. Trump didn’t want to nail their heads to the floor; they insisted. He had to. They had transgressed the unwritten law, whatever it was.
As expected as the Senate’s verdict was, it is a struggle to be optimistic this morning about our country’s future when so many among us behave like victims of a violent spouse or cult leader.
“It’s hard to be human,” Democrats’ impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said, quoting his late son in his Saturday afternoon closing. His daughter Hannah had felt sorry for the children of one insurrectionist who said goodbye to his children before heading to Washington, D.C. He expected violence there and felt he might never see them again. Jamie Raskin felt shame. He viewed the statement as a prosecutor would. His daughter saw it like a human being, like someone who had just lost her brother.
Hannah saw through the legality and politics clear through to the humanity. His kids, Raskin said, “are literally better people than me.”
Raskin’s closing was as artful as it was human.
“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” Raskin said, something from Exodus remembered from Sunday school. The rest of the verse Raskin did not recite. In another translation it reads, “neither shall you testify in court to side with a multitude to pervert justice.”
Yet those who would be Republican leaders in the Senate, 43 anyway, did just that. Cowed, fawning, they excused their abuser, the would be autocrat, and still call themselves Americans.
Bill McKibben writes at The New Yorker that Raskin’s America is more hopeful, more courageous, more democratic, and more beautiful. “Although constantly accused of undermining American pride, of debasing American history, progressives are, in fact, the ones who actually understand the nation’s story,” McKibben writes. And Raskin is one who can tell it:
On Thursday, Raskin, arguing gamely for a conviction that everyone knows he cannot win, had to pretend that his audience of senators shared his assumptions about democracy. But, of course, many of them didn’t—many had truckled to Trump precisely in order to maintain position and privilege. Is there anyone who thinks that a 1776 version of Lindsey Graham would have been fighting alongside Sam Adams and Tom Paine? It’s much easier to imagine him as a bewigged and bewildered gent ordering the servants to pack the household baggage for the move back to London with the other Tories. That members of the party that licked Trump’s spittle called themselves “Republicans” and pretended their subservience was somehow an attack on “élites” is a reminder of the power of the idea that they have done their best to wreck.
One has to stand up to that privilege and rank and vested interest constantly, so Raskin’s case was made for history—a case against Trump, and the next Trump, and the Trump after that, if we’re lucky enough to endure as a country to see those challenges. And, if we are that lucky, it will be because new generations of Raskins will keep standing up to power, very much in the progressive tradition that goes back to our founding. American history is full of ugliness, but there is beauty at its core, as well, and that was what illuminated this week’s proceedings.