Civil Commotion

You can’t con an honest man.
Anonymous

The senate default of Trump’s impeachment trial makes the president, effectively, a monarch unconstrained by the law. After all, he is free to ignore subpoenas, misappropriate public monies for private partisan use — even if it leads to the death of America’s allies, obstruct the operation of justice, tell blatant lies, and gloat over those foiled in the expectation of common decency.

Historians will study the emasculation of the Senate — the world’s greatest deliberative body — by a grotesque carnival barker for the next 100-years. And inevitably, one after another, they will come to the same conclusion: That’s what a decisive faction of Americans wanted.

The evangelicals will be relatively easy to decipher. Trump plays to their resentments and, since so much of their lives are devoted to maintaining garish fictions, the pretense that he is an honorable man and not a corrupt madman is small additional burden. And what, after all, does Christianity really offer but the promise of eternal childhood? That soon we will all live peacefully under the reign of a benevolent, absolute, dictator?

Small wonder that so many of them view the depredations of Donald Trump as a fulfillment.

But what on earth has happened to the Senators? I honestly believed that, push come to shove, they would stand-up for the prerogatives and power of the Senate. I even believed they would stand-up for American ideals, that they would look past short-term advantage and grasp that they are throwing-away something unique, something precious, the imperfect but endless striving toward an Enlightenment ideal never elsewhere manifested on the earth.

What happened to them? The evangelicals who comprise Trump’s base have always been anti-American ignoramuses, so they are behaving in a predictable way. Were the Senators, too, untouched by the music of America’s uniqueness, and merely a pack of self-interested hustlers with no sense of the greatness they were privileged to give direction? That’s hard to accept, somehow, and yet … here we are, with Donald Trump formally freed to grow more arbitrary, more brazenly corrupt, more unconstrained by the norms of ordinary decency and ethical governance.

America has a last chance, and it is a long shot with Trump freed to corrupt the election, and that is to beat him — again — at the ballot box. It’s that, or forget that we are the two-legged citizens of a republic; we will become the scraping and bowing subjects of a monarch.

Mitt Romney, who thought that the Senate ought to call witnesses and at least appear to be conducting a trial of the President, has been disinvited from this year’s CPAC meeting.

The GOP has degenerated into a cult. Do yourself, and your country, a favor during the next few weeks and read William Shirer’s The Nightmare Years; you ought to be deeply frightened by our cowardly Senate’s refusal to do its duty, and that failure stands to be immensely consequential.

What do you know? More venues have cancelled plans for a Franklin Graham sales extravaganza.

Franklin Graham has asked for prayer as he remains determined to see through his planned UK tour despite multiple venues backing out.

The Liverpool ACC, Glasgow SEC and ICC Wales have all pulled out of hosting evangelistic events as part of Graham’s eight-city UK tour, due to take place over the summer.

The Newcastle Arena has come under pressure to cancel his scheduled event at the venue on June 3.

Graham is the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.

Opposition to Graham’s appearances has been organized by LGBT activists, because Graham is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage, and rests his objection on Leviticus. In other words, he is opposed to same-sex marriage because the Bible says so, and that’s that.

Graham, and the like-minded, are the victims of childhood indoctrination in the marketing lie that the Bible is inerrant.

No. It isn’t. The Creation story is untrue, the story of The Fall is untrue, the story of the global flood is untrue, and I don’t personally worry much about a 7-headed dragon scything down the wicked, like me and probably a lot of Civil Commotion readers, even if it is foretold in Revelation. The Bible, I am afraid, is wildly errant, and those who insist otherwise are ignorant fools — case closed. It’s a bit like Holocaust denialism: pending new evidence, some things just have to be considered settled.

The irony is that much of what is found in the Old Testament has Babylonian antecedents; the Genesis account of The Fall, for instance, and the story of the flood, are plainly adopted from much older stories. Those older stories, being nearer in time to the events they allege to describe, should be more accurate. That is, I should trust Gilgamesh rather than the story of Noah and the Ark, and I should trust Atrahasis rather than the story of The Fall. Curiously, however, few Christians would hesitate to agree with me that those tales are myths.

Truly, He works in Mysterious Ways.

Elizabeth Warren posed a discomfiting question to the Senate yesterday.

At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?

It needs no imagination to understand that Justice Roberts was probably made uncomfortable by the question — but she has a point. The Republicans apparently intend to get the so-called “trial” over as quickly as possible, calling no witnesses and permitting the introduction of no evidence beyond the original referral from the House.

In what sense, then, is it proper to speak of the Senate circus as a trial? And is Justice Roberts not, in fact, presiding over a fraud against the American people?

Warren is being bashed on opinion pages just now for making Roberts uncomfortable, but I suspect that the long view of the question will be kind to her and hard on Roberts and the Senate.

As a vote on calling witnesses looms in the Senate impeachment trial, and all the people who claim to know these sorts of things say McConnell has enough votes to prevent calling witnesses, I find myself recalling the ascent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany. From a précis of William Shirer’s account of Hitler rise to Germany’s Chancellorship, published in the Los Angeles Times:

When no party attained a majority after the elections of 1932, the president, Paul von Hindenburg, called for a coalition government (composed of Nazis, Communists, Social Democrats and the Center Party) and with Hitler as chancellor. On becoming Chancellor, Hitler had the Nazis torch the Reichstag, and had the Communists (who intimidated opponents also) blamed for the act. With the Communists purged from the Reichstag, Hitler, with von Hindenburg’s blessing, called for a new general election.

Hitler was again thwarted, as the Nazis were rejected by the people, and they remained a minority political party. Then, Hitler demanded the Reichstag grant him exceptional powers under a bill titled “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and Reich.” After much politicking, and with Hitler promising to respect von Hindenburg’s right of veto, the Center Party voted with the Nazis for the bill, thus giving Hitler the majority he needed in the Reichstag. With the bill passed, Hitler never looked back, as von Hindenburg died shortly thereafter. A constitutionally elected government was thus overthrown by its own legislative branch.

What has gone wrong, I suppose, is that the Founders assumed that legislators would be jealous of their prerogatives and power; certainly, they would be dumbstruck by the sight of a craven Senate acquiescing in the plain lawlessness of such as Donald Trump.

The classical, almost universally accepted explanation of Hitler’s popularity finds its locus in reaction against the humiliations of Versaille following World War I. Similarly, Trump’s support is found chiefly, though not exclusively, among the non-college educated who have been left behind, and often jobless, by evolving technologies and their associated cultural shifts.

It’s not over till it’s over, but the look of things just now is that we’re about to be betrayed into authoritarianism by cynical Trump sycophants — looking at you, Alan Dershowitz — and Senators cowed by the American Gothic crowd.