By Chris Satullo
The case being presented is meticulous, striking, eloquent and airtight.
And kinda futile.
Because it wouldn’t matter if the House impeachment managers added Clarence Darrow and Lawrence Tribe to their ranks – or Perry Mason and Jack McCoy. And it doesn’t matter that the defendant’s attorneys could have been outargued by Bert and Ernie.
Donald Trump will be acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial for the second time; watch for a verdict soon on your favorite cable news channel.
So is it all a waste of time and legislative breath?
No.
The charting, in chilling, video-laden detail, of the depths of Trump’s narcissistic, authoritarian sins – and the human damage they caused – will in fact prove useful. It is establishing an historical record. Someday, God willing, most Americans will look back at the accounting of the roots and deeds of Jan. 6 that unspooled this week and say: “Good grief, let’s never let that happen again.”
In this, our own moment, perhaps this reckoning of horrors can prod whatever sliver of the Trump electorate is open to reason, regret and persuasion. Perhaps it will lead at least some to break free of “the weird worship of one dude” that Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska just decried in a brave video message to his constituents.
So, yeah, when the votes to acquit roll in, I’ll be disgusted – but not disheartened. To the contrary, I say: Let’s do this again. Many times over.
No, not impeachment itself. But congressional hearings, with the subpoena power wielded and enforced? Oh my yes. A thousand times yes.
Jan. 6 and the Big Election Lie are not the only calamities and calumnies of the Trump era that need to be autopsied so future generations can learn from them. Otherwise, vital lessons will get obscured by the relentless Trumpian fog machine and the deep need of the man’s hypocritical enablers to “move on” – i.e., to bury their own roles in what did and didn’t happen these last five years.
Our need to look backward, even as we work to lift our lives and communities from the wreckage, is profound. Here are two important lessons, among many, that the Trump nightmare taught us:
- Our Constitution is not self-enforcing. Its principles need to be embodied in sound statutes, which in turn need to be carried out and enforced by all three branches, each in its constitutional role. Trump violated the spirit and letter of our founding charter in ways that proved difficult to curb, in part because existing statutes did not anticipate his reckless, ingenious forms of malfeasance. Meanwhile, the lack of clear statutory standards enabled his enablers in Congress to shrug at his misdeeds.
- Many norms of presidential behavior we once considered intrinsic to the office turned out to be mere traditions – enforced only by a president’s desire for the good opinion of those who revere those traditions. We’ve just seen dozens of such norms get incinerated by a barbarian who scorned them.
Norms are not enough to stop an amoral person. So, at least in some cases, the norms will need to be converted into laws.
Making laws, then conducting oversight of the executive to make sure those laws are faithfully executed, are core duties of Congress. That was easy to forget these last few years, as most on Capitol Hill checked their spines into a locker at Dulles, then lost the combination.
The yoked duties to make good laws and to oversee the executive now place a burden on Congress’ slim Democratic majorities. They must ignore both Joe Biden’s likely pleading and their Republican colleagues’ hypocritical whining that the nation needs to “move on.” We shouldn’t let the past lie (in both senses of the word).
The Dems need to multitask. On top of addressing pandemic, recession, climate change, racial justice and the whole heaped plate of dilemmas Trump left them, the moment demands they find the time and courage to shine a steady, piercing light on the Orange One’s norm-shattering and law-breaking.
At disciplined hearings – without their usual grandstanding (which was blessedly scarce this week) – Democrats must grill the once-powerful people who were in the room when bad things happened. These people should be subpoenaed. If they defy the subpoenas, hold them in contempt and refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution. Heck, I say, revive Congress’ power to arrest and detain a defiant witness. No gentleness for those who tried to burn down the republic and now want to be left in peace to write their memoirs.
Oh, GOP lawmakers and Fox News hosts will howl about partisan outreach. Ignore them. With their cowardly indulgence of Trump’s reckless lies and his fomenting of insurrection, the GOP caucuses have surrendered any right to be taken seriously. Not to mention that these are the same hypocrites who held six separate investigations into Benghazi.
What should Congress investigate? Here is a partial list of topics where full and factual probes could lead to needed legislation:
Stranded immigrant children
By a recent count, our government has lost track of the parents of 628 children who were separated from them by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. What are we doing to repair this inexcusable situation? How did it happen? What needs to be done, in law, policy, or procedure, to prevent this abomination from recurring?
The emoluments clauses
Simply put, the Constitution bars presidents from receiving any meaningful gifts or compensation from foreign governments, state governments or branches of the federal government. POTUS’ salary and lavish support services are meant to be compensation enough.
The goal is to deny self-interest any room to trump (sorry, it’s the right word) the people’s interest. No prior president, not even the notorious ones, tested this principle the way DJT and his children did. None ever treated the presidency so brazenly as a branding opportunity and debt escape plan the way the Trumps did. None ever continued to operate a global business, while pretending not to, while showing no understanding of the concept of conflict of interest. Clearly, we need some statutes spelling out what the emoluments clauses now mean in a globally connected economy. To do that, begin with a deep dive into the Trumps’ carnival of corruption.
Tax returns
We still haven’t seen Trump’s, except for the glimpses his estranged niece gave us. Seeing them in full might help untangle some mysteries connected to the emoluments issue as well as another crucial riddle: Why did he kowtow so to Vladimir Putin? But the main point: We may need a law incentivizing major party nominees to reveal their tax returns. Knowing what vital connections we missed or couldn’t figure out because we didn’t have Trump’s returns might help clinch the case for such a law.
The Hatch Act
Trump, his re-election campaign and his inner circle sneered at and obliterated this law limiting political activity by active federal employees. It needs a review and a rewrite. A full accounting of their misbehavior would help.
The Justice Department
Trump exposed how tissue-thin the foundation is for the notions that the Justice Department is independent, that it doesn’t indulge in political prosecutions, that the Attorney General is the nation’s lawyer, not the president’s. I’ve long argued that the AG is different from all other Cabinet officials, that a president is due less deference on this nomination, that AG nominees should get stricter scrutiny. Seems high time to consider that, after the pathetic Bill Barr Experience.
Pandemic response
We will face a pandemic again, far sooner than 100 years from now. Some fatal Covid-19 errors that were driven by Trump’s ego won’t be repeated. But how do we replenish stockpiles, handle the logistics of vaccination, and navigate around the savage inequalities of our health delivery system better than our botched performance this time? What, for example, would a sane schooling policy – freed from the emotions roused by Trump’s anti-scientific gaslighting – look like?
Conduct of elections
The Big Lie is so embedded in the minds of millions it might take a generation for the toxic effects to fade. That makes it all the more vital to document fairly whatever limited problems occurred inside the last election – and what threat digital hacking poses to future ones. Then let’s find fixes and, here’s an idea, fund them. More important still would be to expose and uproot the real “cheating” problem with our elections: the long plot of gerrymandering and racially-tinged vote suppression that Republicans have sustained for decades, disguising it all the while with their bogus claims of massive vote fraud.
The Kurds
Remember them? Our brave allies in the Middle East whom we betrayed and left to be slaughtered in Syria because…why? Because Trump wanted to play footsie with a Turkish autocrat? Or something else? If the Benghazi fiasco merited six separate House probes, surely this most shameful of episodes in the four year catalog of shame deserves at least one.
Remember, while Donald Trump was a Svengali of manipulation, he was also a lazy, incurious man more interested in proclaiming autocratic powers than actually gaining and exercising them. The next would-be authoritarian seeking to harness the MAGA whirlwind that Trump has unleashed might be smarter, harder-working and more savvy about how to wield power.
He might even be a Yale Law grad with a grasp of the Constitution that would enable him to cloak his depredations more cunningly. He might even be hard at work already, positioning himself as the next leader of the Trumpist cult.
Yeah, talkin’ about you, Josh Hawley.
We’ve got to stop you before you get going. We’ve got to get every American outside the cult to grasp just how lawless, reckless and damaging the Trump years were, how close we came to losing it all. We have to retrieve Congress’ spine from that Dulles locker, re-establish norms and craft more tools to foil anti-constitutional behavior.
Before it’s too late. Before a smarter pirate with darker plans swoops in to plunder our Republic.
Thoughts? Feel free to contact me at csatullo@gmail.com
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia