Accordingly, fuddle duddle entered the Canadian lexicon.
Also on this day, President Nixon apparently started secretly taping conversations in the While House.
Lots of people are asking the same question.
And now NPR is taking a look at it:
Frankly, I think the answer is no, and the example of Richard Nixon is a good one. Sure, he'd been pardoned, but an impeachment might not really remove the incidents of being convicted in an impeachment. If Congress thought there was any chance that they could have tried a President after he left office, they would have impeached Nixon.
And the text of the Constitution is clear:
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment,
"[N]ot further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office . . .
It doesn't say "removal. . . or disqualification". It says not further than "removal. . . and disqualification.
Of course, you could argue, and now the argument will be made, that those punishments are the highest that can be meted out, but lesser ones can be as well. So they're a cap. And you could still find a person disqualified to hold office.
Sure, that's true, but by the same logic you could find an aged bank robber who passes away prior to his trial liable for the full measure of a sentence as well.
And that's the problem. Impeachment is for removal.
And the fact that impeachment is for removal means we're now going to see the government tied up in the circus of an impeachment trial followed by some sort of appeal to the United States Supreme Court. . . assuming that a motion to dismiss isn't entertained and granted by Justice Roberts, who has the misfortune of presiding over all of this. It'll be a giant distraction, and a distraction at the very period where Biden, if he's to have a successful Presidency, needs to act.
And there are alternatives. If President Trump is guilty of crimes, which it is argued an impeachment does not actually require, he could be charged and tried for those. Indeed, a long investigation in New York is still pending and seems likely to. If he's convicted of any felony, he's likewise be unable to hold further office, and there's be additional penalties at that.
Which is why he'll likely attempt to pardon himself on the way out the door.
But, at least in my view, you can't pardon yourself. It's never been tested, of course, but I doubt very much you can do it, and when that's reviewed by the Court, the Court will hold that. To hold opposite would be to place the President above the law.
None of which is an argument in any fashion to the effect that the entire post election administration denying the results of the vote fiasco shouldn't be looked at. Real damage has been done to our democracy and the insurrection was inexcusable. The basic gist of impeaching the President would be due to the insurrection, the full facts of which we really aren't aware of in regards to guilt. At a bare minimum, Trump was careless with his words and that fueled the violent storming of the Capitol. That may or may not be a crime under conventional law, but under the Constitution, it might amount to a "misdemeanor" in context, a topic that we dealt with way back during the President's first impeachment. Which means that the impeachment trial may end up being essentially a prolonged hearing which may be worthwhile undertaking in its own right, for fact finding purposes. And they likely feel that they simply can't stand and do nothing.
Which gets me back to some earlier made points, one being that if Nixon had been tried back in 1973, which would have required Ford not pardoning him, we wouldn't be enduring this now.
Actions and words, we're told, have consequences. And we're told that because they do.
During Trump's rise to power and during his administration his biggest ally in the press has been Fox News, which for the most part has reliably been on Trump's side. That started to come apart after the election during which Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to deny the reality of his loss grew, but even then they still supported him when they could conscience it.
A couple of days ago a Fox commentator, Ainsley Earhardt made this observation on her show Fox & Friends:
There are 75 million people that voted for President Trump. And they are scared. They are worried about what the future of this country looks like. They are confused and heartbroken that their candidate didn't win and they don't want to be forgotten.
She was pretty rapidly shouted down in the media.
That doesn't mean that Earhardt isn't right. Indeed, she largely is, although the 75,000,000 figure for the brokenhearted and scared isn't correct. Donald Trump did receive 75,000,000 votes, but some of those votes were from lukewarm supporters who won't cry over his departure now. Quite a few conservative voters felt that Trump was the only option they had, which doesn't mean that they otherwise were his fans. Catholic and other Apostolic Christian voters often felt they had to vote for him as, ironically, his Catholic opponent seems to stand for principals that are deeply contrary to their moral beliefs, but quite a few of them otherwise found the President to be repulsive. And Donald Trump's actions following his November defeat have turned quite a few of his former supporters definitively away from him.
That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't have a lot of support. The down ballot results for the GOP show that the populist wing of the Republican Party definitely had a lot of support going into the November election, although it lost some in formerly Republican Georgia as a result of Trump's behavior. It's no doubt lost more now.
Still, Earhardt has a point.
Populist and conservative voters, and the two may overlap but are not the same, have a real reason to be scared, worried, confused and heartbroken.
And the reason for that is that Donald Trump's post election behavior has brought in a united Democratic government that's not only united by party, but united against Trumpism, and licensed for radicalism to a large degree.
In other words, since the election, Donald Trump has machinated for reasons that are difficult to discern, but which seem rooted in narcissism, to bring about the very situation which he claimed to be the one who was protecting against it.
Early after the election we did a series of "post mortems" on where it appeared things were headed, but we did note that the Georgia election would determine a lot of that. What we didn't see was an insurrection and an administrative support for it that has caused some overseas to regard it as an attempted coup.
And that changes everything. . . probably.
We really only have three examples of something like this, with one so old as to be probably not worth really discussing in this context. The three would be the post Revolution government of the United States, the second the post Civil War, and the third being the post Watergate.
The post Watergate is the most analogous.
We don't remember very much of what occurred in the US after the American Congress won the war against the United Kingdom. What we do tend to recall is the prolonged effort to work out a form of government, which was messy and which involved a lot of infighting. We won't go into it in detail, but it's worth noting that we commonly hear about the American Revolution was that it was a "conservative revolution".
It wasn't.
The American Revolution was a radical revolution based on the concept, by its end, if the people being sovereign. It was framed, however, by a largely common culture that had largely shared values and a preexisting governmental structure. It's overall thesis; monarchs meant nothing and the rights of individuals as expressed through legislators was radical. The country rejected the concept of monarchy and the rights of monarchs entirely. It also adopted a type of nationalism that is prior sovereign had not expressed and would not for many years. It went so far as to see the severance of the dominant church, the Church of England, which claimed apostolic succession, from its acknowledged head, an act of near schism that went along with the Revolution.
Following the Revolution the country did adopt an orderly form of democracy that we retain, with modifications, today. But it also expelled Loyalist through community action and kept them out through legal process after the war, turning large numbers of Americans into refugees simply because they took loyalty to the legitimate government seriously. It's not well remembered now, even though it was a dramatic hostile act at the time, and it formed the real origins of Canada, through loyalist refugee communities.
Moreover, Donald Trump has actually managed to make Richard Nixon look good. Nixon was paranoid but he didn't attempt to retain power and actually resigned, rather than be impeached and convicted. He didn't have the support of his party at that time, of course, and he knew it, but Trump has rapidly lost much of his support in Congress as well and doesn't seem to acknowledge that other than to lash out at those who have left him. Nixon's GOP, however, remained largely intact in 1976 and reorganized, with an insurgent wing that still remains, by 1980. That new party, part establishment and part populist, just ripped apart and is only barely a single party. There's a good chance that it will split into two.
So, here's what I think follows.
At this point, Biden has no reason not to go as left as he wants to and there will be no real hindrance to him going as far in that direction save his own inclinations and those of Democrats who are really in tightly contested regions. All the warnings and crises about "Socialism" and the like mean utterly nothing whatsoever right now, and they won't for the rest of the year. Ironically, therefore, Donald Trump has brought about the very situation which he used to stoke the flames of his support.
Moreover, Biden is beholding to his party's left and has now lost the argument he had for not giving it much of what it wants. He can't maintain that a divided government forces him to play ball with the GOP in the same way he could have before last week. He can still make that argument, but it's much weakened as the Democrats can get their legislation through unless they themselves do not support it.
And this means that we're going to get a lot of pent up Democratic legislation. There will be new environmental regulation and it will go much further than anything prior to it. There will be gun control. Policies favoring abortion and new categories of sexual identity are going forward. The courts are now going to take a giant leap to the left in terms of new appointments.
The country isn't going to be completely made over, but much of it is. And the people the country can thank or blame for that are those who stormed Congress last week.
Sedition.
We've been seeing a lot of it, in a lot of places, and by people who should, and frankly do, know better, those people seeing the citizens of the United States as ignorant dupes.
What exactly, you may wonder, is sedition? Well, under the current law, it is defined as follows:
18 U.S § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
So, the elements are:
1. Two ore more people who;
2. Conspire to:
But what about the political leader, the President of the United States, who urged them into the act?
Well, let's consider he not only did that, but he also made a telephone call, with his confederates, trying to pressure Georgia officials into throwing the election for him.
Sedition?
Well, I suppose it depends on what he meant. During his impeachment trial it was maintained that things he said in his telephone call with the leader of the Ukraine could have meant more than one thing. Perhaps that's the case here as well. But a jury could decide either way here. . . and not just on the statements, but also by the collective acts of pressuring and then urging here and there.
And what about local leaders who backed this farce. The GOP in more than one location, through its state organizations, has been backing the fantasy that the President won the election. Is that sedition? Probably not. But its not very honorable.
But going further, what about legislators who know, or should know better, and who argue that Senators and Congressmen who are not going along with this should be brought before the state legislator to be held into account. Sedition? No, but again, distressing.*
And this all matters enormously.
Twice in this country's history the nation has let those who committed grave offenses against the democracy of the nation get away with it; once following the Civil War when it did not try the guilty and punish them under the law, and once in the 1970s when an effort to steal an election through actual theft was covered up by the person it was intended to benefit.** In both of those instances a national act of mercy was misbegotten and lead to further crimes and errors. The Reagan administration barely got away with unlawful arms sales, for example. And now Donald Trump has tried to steal an election, wrecked the conservatives party he belongs to, and put the nation in a state of insurrection.
This time, the guilty must be punished. The act is too brazen, the crime too great, and the implications too vast not to do so. An insurrection has happened. The capitol has been vandalized for the first time since the War of 1812, when at least it was the British, not rebellious Americans, who did it.*** If we do not, we will pay for it as a nation.
So, the first thing that must be done is to try the insurrectionist. The penalty is clear, and they should get the full measure of the law.
And those seditionist otherwise involved in this sorry scene should pay as well, including Donald Trump. The soul of the nation depends on it, and the future of the Republican Party. Republicans should demand it. And immediately.
And those politicians urging fantasies upon the people, both great and small? Well, they can't be tried, but it's lawful not to seat them.
Urging an illegal overthrowal of the elected head of state simply because you disagree with him, and deluding others into the idea that the election was tainted, is the end state of democracies. Not addressing it puts us on the path trod by Mexico in 1910, Russia in 1917,Germany in 1932, and Italy and Spain prior to that. The choices are stark but the lessons of the failure to act are clear.
Choices have consequences, including bad and deluded ones. Unfortunately, they have consequences for everyone, not just the person making them.
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*What about sinful? At least one of the individuals doing this is my co-religious. Telling lies can be a pretty serious sin from the Catholic prospective. A public official telling them must not only confess his sins, but arguably must rectify the misdeed to the extent he can, which would be a public recanting of his statement.
This assumes knowledge, of course. A person can't seriously sin if they don't know what they're doing is sinful, from the Catholic prospective. But blinding yourself to the truth may be a factor, perhaps.
And what about the pulpit. If there's a parishioner in the pews telling lies is there a pastoral duty to correct? Maybe.
**And in this act of Richard Nixon, it might be noted, there was the irony that his campaign had no need to do this. Therefore, just as Donald Trump has thrown his party under the bus needless, so had Richard Nixon.
***The Capitol was not even touched during the Civil War, although mostly because the rebellious Southern states didn't have the capacity to do it.
Supreme Court blogger Amy Howe takes a look at a topic that's been coming up a lot recently, that being the President's power to pardon. She looks at it from the prospective of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The article addresses the topic of whether the President can pardon himself, as he can pardon others for crimes they're not actually convicted of. My feeling is that he cannot, although as noted, it's an undecided legal issue.
Going out from there and into the controversial, the only existing Presidential pardon of a former President, Gerald Ford's pardon of President Nixon, is in my view one of the great American blunders of the 20th Century, or perhaps in our entire history. Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his role in covering up the Watergate break-in. His conviction and sentencing would have stood as an example that Presidents aren't above the law, which Nixon famously stated in an interview that they were. HIs pardoning suggested that in fact they were, no matter what Ford's intent was.
To go to the really controversial, I feel the same way about figures from the Confederacy who would have been logically subject to criminal charges for their role in rebelling against the United States. By this I'm not suggesting that they should have tried men down to the enlisted ranks, or even all of the officers. But they should have tried the principal political figures like Jefferson Davis. They should also have tried U.S. Army officers who abandoned their commissions to serve in the Confederate forces.
That's a harsh, Radical Republican (in the terms of the day) view, but that would have chastised a South that was ready to cooperate with the Federal government and it would have kept the Southern aristocracy from regaining control of the region. It would have put us decades ahead in achieving a more equitable society as well. It was an opportunity lost.
Indeed, both acts of mercy were opportunities lost, with the merciful forgetting that there really are no "chapters in history". It's one long book.
