Deconstructing America

Wednesday’s vote—anticipated with near-perfect precision since the opening hours of the Ukraine scandal in September—has yielded a new indictment: The partisan divisions that saved Trump are an expression of deeper and malignant trends that are a threat to constitutional democracy.

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[Mitt[] Romney in his floor speech said his fellow Republicans were casting different votes in good faith. That’s a generous appraisal. It is impossible to believe that Senate Republicans would think it would be fine if President Hillary Clinton had linked military aid to her domestic political needs, or even that they would be disturbed by this but think impeachment is excessive.

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But one paradox of the past 30 years is that the various legal and political instruments to investigate, expose, and try to punish misbehavior of people in power have not made it harder to get away with questionable behavior. They have made it easier.

Bill Clinton was investigated for years over obscure business dealings in the Whitewater affair that took place a decade before he came to power. His decision to replace the White House travel office was a controversy that echoed for his first term.

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Twenty years later, it is worth recalling the matters that have only briefly dented headlines during the Trump years, or in some cases barely dented them at all.

Recall that Trump is the first president in the modern era to not release his taxes; he is facing inquiries over his Inaugural Committee’s overseas contributions and its contracts at his hotels and his personal foundation’s unfulfilled pledges of donations to worthy causes. He has seen the criminal convictions of his campaign manager, his first national security adviser and his personal lawyer. He has confronted allegations of self-dealing or misuse of taxpayer funds among officials at his health department, EPA, and Transportation Department, among others.

These and other matters briefly cause an uproar, or not, then fade from consciousness of the opposition party, of the news media, of the public.

This inability to give sustained focus on ethical matters that an earlier generation would have commanded national attention for months or years is not a structural challenge of the Constitution. Nor it is a thwarting of democracy. It is the expression of a democracy that has allowed its muscles of accountability to atrophy.

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[The] fundamental problem of modern political culture is the erosion of accountability. Politicians have shown repeatedly the ability to escape consequences by reframing almost any controversy away from the particulars of misbehavior to the familiar question: Which side are you on, mine or my enemies?

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In the Trump-Ukraine matter, both the partisan House vote to impeach and the partisan Senate vote to acquit were, in broad terms, a faithful reflection of popular will.

It is the nature of popular will—bitterly cleaved, indifferent to facts except as they can be employed as weapon or shield—that is the challenge.

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The 48 senators who voted to convict (lone Republican Mitt Romney, plus all Democrats and socialist Bernie Sanders and independent Angus King) represent states with 171.4 million Americans.

The 52 Republicans who voted to acquit represent states with 156 million Americans.

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Liberal frustration is understandable. The last two Republican presidents won first terms after losing the popular vote. The intentional dilution of pure democracy in the Senate—Wyoming’s 600,000 people get two senators; so do California’s 40 million—is growing starker each year.

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David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College in New York, has done research projecting that in 20 years, 70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states, meaning that 30 percent of Americans will be represented by 70 senators.

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These structural distortions may well be a long-term problem for constitutional democracy.

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A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll last week found 50 percent approval for removing Trump from office, and 43 percent disapproval. A composite of polls by the FiveThirtyEight website found that 84 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of independents, and nine percent of Republicans wanted Trump removed from office. This averaged out just under 48 percent of all Americans—by coincidence the very number of senators voting to remove.

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.