Frank Bruni of The New York Times, writes about a point that has irritated me for for a while, namely that Republicans shirk their duty to their constituents by claiming they can’t work in an election year:
Once the Senate concludes its trial of President Trump, it should go into recess. Until next January. The House, too. Lawmakers shouldn’t pass legislation, consider nominations or make any important decisions whatsoever: This is an election year, and the voters will soon weigh in on the direction of America. The nation’s business should await that judgment, lest members of Congress contradict it.
A ludicrous proposal? Indeed. But it’s in line with — and an extrapolation of — a favorite argument against Trump’s conviction and removal from office. His Republican supporters say that lawmakers shouldn’t speak for voters on such a crucial issue. To pre-empt the verdict at the ballot box, they say, is to subvert the people’s will.
Nice try. Lawmakers are elected specifically to speak for voters on crucial issues. That’s the system. That’s their job. American government doesn’t operate by daily, hourly or issue-by-issue polls (at least not overtly). Congress doesn’t have exponentially more power one week after Election Day than it does one year later (though it may indeed have more political currency).
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Republicans have decided to sing a different tune. If it sounds familiar, that’s because they turned to the same music when the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared that a presidential election about eight months in the offing prevented the Senate from taking any action. It was a song not of principle but of political convenience. The same holds true now.
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the framers of the Constitution, who established the impeachment process to do essentially that and declined to add any asterisks about the next election’s imminence? “If the framers thought impeachment in an election year was a bad idea, they could have set things up differently,” noted Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and the author of the 2018 book “These Truths: A History of the United States.”
“They could have instituted a mechanism for an interim election, for instance,” Lepore told me. “They did not. They could have said, ‘Except not in an election year.’ They did not. You want there to be no impeachments allowed in an election year, ever? You have to get a constitutional amendment ratified.” And that would never happen, because it would be license for a president to do anything he or she wanted, fearlessly, if it synced with the calendar just so.
(click here to continue reading Opinion | Of All Trump’s Defenses, This Is the Lamest – The New York Times.)
The next Democratic president ought to seriously consider packing the courts to make up for McConnell’s scheme to keep the Supreme Court with a conservative majority, and shorten the term of President Obama to 7 years.
Furthermore, as Mr. Bruni recounts, the voters did speak their mind about Trumpism – the 2018 election was a landslide for not-Trump!
What’s happening to Trump isn’t muscling voters out of the process but, rather, taking into account what voters recently did. “You only get an impeachment vote when people have changed their minds,” she [Alison LaCroix, a University of Chicago professor who teaches constitutional law and American history] said, referring to their opinions about a sitting president. “The votes comes from the House, and we know, from things like the midterm elections, that some amount of people have changed their minds. Another party has gained control of the House. That has to be telling us something.”
The Do Nothing Party for sure.
