Another first for Donald Trump
If we embrace the rule of law, we charge the former president
If you watched Monday’s final public meeting of the Jan. 6th Select Committee, you saw the culmination of 10 public hearings and interviews with more than 1,000 people. You saw videos that were every bit as disturbing as the first time you watched, and recorded telephone phone calls where we again got to hear an elected official try to pressure election officials into lying.
And then you saw, for the first time in our country’s history, a Congressional committee recommending that a former U.S. president be charged for committing some significant crimes.
The committee voted to recommend Justice Department prosecutors charge the former president with at least four crimes:
Inciting or assisting an insurrection
Obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress
Conspiracy to defraud the United States
Conspiracy to make a false statement.
If he is found guilty of one or all of these and sentenced to prison, that would, given his age, effectively be a life sentence for Donald Trump. Basically, we saw what happens when an administration is divided into the narcissist Trump and his supporters, and “Team Normal,” except that members of the latter team were ineffective or worse.
During Monday’s hearings, the cameras occasionally lingered on the Capitol police officers who’d survived the attack and came to watch this last meeting. It was hard not to be moved as they dropped their heads and stared at the floor.
It was also hard to ignore just how close we came — but for a handful of brave people like those police officers — to utter chaos.
Earlier this year, there were reports about how much information about the former president would be included in the final report, but those discussions appear to have been settled. The committee voted unanimously to approve the final report with Trump at the center, the beginning, and the end of the insurrection. You can read the introduction to their report here, and if you do read it, you can reminisce about Drunk Rudy (p. 8) who was so weird he got locked out of an office, on purpose (p. 14), and you can read about Trump’s magic thinking that he’d won the election (too many pages to cite here). The full report should be released in the next day or so.
In opening remarks, Liz Cheney, outgoing Republican representative from Wyoming and vice-chair of the committee, referenced her great-great-grandfather, who fought for the Union in the Civil War. She quoted a historian from that time, about her great-great-grandfather’s regiment:
“They had a just appreciation of the value and vantage of fee government, and the necessity of defending and maintaining it.”
She also said, of the former president:
“He is unfit for any office.”
I once again find myself agreeing with a rock-ribbed Republican. Hold him accountable. Render him unable to run for office ever again. As the chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said, the only way to prevent this from ever happening again is to demand accountability. Put him somewhere where he must read the judges’ decisions of those 61 court cases he lost for the rest of his natural days. We will all be better off for it.
In the Black community there is a derogatory retort directed at black folks who aren’t sensitive to the centuries of horrible abuse inflicted upon our people. Those who refuse to recognize the impact of what this kind of ancestral pain does to the very construct of families and people. They are told they are not “Black enough”, to feel nor understand the pain. Or worse they have chosen to “unremember” because it’s not convenient.
I have come to this conclusion: Trump isn’t “American enough”. He doesn’t appreciate what this nation has been through, the wars both external and internal. He and his followers aren’t “American enough” to fully embrace the extraordinary striving for justice and honesty that could make this a noble nation. They’re not “American enough’ to allow full participation in a truly diverse country in which all might participate to make it a great democracy.
They are just not American enough!
I started reading the intro to the report last night. I don't attend church anymore, but the next time I have an opportunity, I will light a candle for Liz Cheney. Just as "only Nixon could go to China," only a rock-ribbed Republican like Liz Cheney could have pulled this off and reached the finish line of the Committee's work. It matters not to me that she and I disagree on most public policy. We agree on this one thing, that FPOTUS and his gang are a threat to the Republic and the rule of law that has sustained us since 1791.