As good an example as exists of just how naive the common imagination of how well The Constitution protects us can be found in the famous speech that the wonderful Barbara Jordan gave on July 25th, 1974 at the Nixon Impeachment Hearings. I had and still have enormous respect for Barbara Jordan but in so many ways her assumptions about the various aspects of the Constitution, from her opening acceptance of the Constitution to her beliefs in the powers of impeachment have proven to be dangerously naive.
Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the preamble to the Constitution of United States. “We the people.” It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We the people.” I’ve felt somehow, for many years, that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We the people.”
Today, I am an inquisitor, and hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Though Barbara Jordan's conception of the Constitution was not typical, she was a brilliant lawyer who was rightly regarded as a scholar of the document. Her famous declaration of her complete faith in the CON-STI-TU-TION, so deceptively clipped for purposes of "civic piety" on PBS and NPR was clearly conditioned on the equality so long and with such pain and bloodshed, struggled for AGAINST THE CLEAR WORDING AND INTENT OF THAT DOCUMENT AS WRITTEN having been won and as secured. It is impossible to believe that she would have declared such a faith before 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, so trashed by subsequent Court rulings, including, most badly, by the Roberts Court, was passed or that other law with it, the Civil Rights Act was all too briefly, the law of the land. She not only would not have said it, she would not have been sitting as a member of Congress without those provisions being dismantled by Constitutional arguments by the Republican-fascist members of the Supreme Court.
It may have seemed that way, at least as a matter of federal law, in 1974 but the increasingly ideologically first Republican, now Republican-fascist Supreme Court and the corporate media, with no small help from the "journalistic ethics" of even the most august of on-paper publications, and the "anti-political correctness" (read "racist) humor of the late 70s and 80s, was soon going to start the dismantling of those rights and that equality that Barbara Jordan's faith in the document rested on. In 2020, that dismantling is open, overt and well underway.
The naivete of the speech is also seen in her belief that the Constitution was strong enough to mean what it said in regard to the impeachment of a criminal, a tyranical and a treasonous president.
That the Republican-fascist Senate refused to impeach Trump for his overt presidential abuse of power, his long, long list of crimes in office, his presidential-treason against The People in his acting as Putin's agent in the oval office is proven beyond any reasonable doubt and yet the same party, in fact many of the same people who impeached Bill Clinton for stupidly lying about a sexual affair in a clear perjury trap set for him by Republicans, both in the Congress and in the judiciary and the special prosecutor chosen by some of the most notorious of Republican-fascists - an abuse of the Constitutional provisions of the impeachment of a president that is, itself, a mockery of the Constitution and the claims made for it by the "founders" makes much of the rest of the substance of Barbara Jordan's famous speech - the parts generally not used as, indeed, her prefacatory condition on which her total faith in the Constitution rested - now ring hollow.
- We know the nature of impeachment. We’ve been talking about it a while now. It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account. It is designed to bridle the Executive if he engages in excesses. It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men. The framers confided in the Congress the power if need be to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a president swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the Executive.
The nature of impeachment, a narrowly channeled exception to the separation of powers maxim. The federal convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term maladministration. “It is to be used only for great misdemeanors,” so it was said in the North Carolina Ratification Convention, and in the Virginia Ratification Convention, “We do not trust our Liberty to a particular branch. We need one branch to check the other.”
“No one need be afraid,” the Northwest Carolina Ratification Convention, “No one need to be afraid that officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity.” “Prosecution of impeachments will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” said Hamilton in the Federalist papers number 65, “We divided the part is more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. I do not mean political parties in that sense.” The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind the impeachment, but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the Constitutional term high crime and misdemeanors.
Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that, “Nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction, but nothing else can.” Common sense would be revolted, if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons.
Well, that certainly isn't how things turned out, both in the use of impeachment against Bill Clinton for the pettiest of reasons PRODUCED BY THE PERJURY TRAP LAID BY SOME OF THE SLEAZIEST ACTORS IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY, Congressional, judicial, and, lest it be forgotten, and probably most consequentially, in the "free press" and in the fixed Senate trial of the most seriously charged president in the sordid history of the American presidency, Trump.
In looking around for material on you, I came across an article written last January on the Religion News Service site.
Consciously or not, Democrats and Republicans alike no longer seem to hold the Constitution to be as textually sacred as they used to. Among the former, complaints about the Electoral College, for example, have grown in intensity in recent years. As for the latter, their attraction to the theory of an all but all-powerful "unitary executive" is profoundly at odds with the framers' commitment to constitutional checks and balances.
Before going on, note this "balance" between Democrats, having had two elections Constitutionally stolen from the winner of the popular vote to put a terrible Republican by the Electoral College system (and the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court) and again sixteen years later deciding it's time for that slave-power enhancing provision put there explicitly for that purpose by the slave-owning founders to finally go against an overtly fascist interpretation of the power of (Republican) presidents. Some balance, huh? The thwarting of electoral democracy by the clear intent of slave owners verses the overt declaration that (Republican) presidents have uncheckable power.
During the present impeachment trial, moreover, it has been hard not to consider the arguments of Trump's defenders as anything other than expressing an unhappiness with the Constitution's impeachment provisions. Against the near-universal consensus of constitutional scholars (not to mention the Nixon articles), they have contended that impeachment for abuse of power is not allowed, and even that a president cannot be impeached if he merely believes that an act is in the public interest.
"How can you look at this and say the Republican Party isn't breaking our constitutional design and creating a massive zone of presidential corruption?" tweeted political commentator Ezra Klein.
In announcing that he would vote against the production of witnesses and documents, retiring Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., granted that the House managers had proved their case that Trump had withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into presidential rival Joe Biden but insisted that this was merely an unimpeachable "inappropriate" act.
The article concludes:
In
the 1988 book that gave constitutional faith its name, law professor
Sanford Levinson argued that this faith was central to American civil
religion, and that while at times verging on idolatry, it played a
critical role in enabling citizens to wrestle with the meaning of the
country. A decade ago, Levinson republished the book with an afterword
renouncing constitutional faith and calling for a new constitutional
convention.
I believe for Levinson, who I agree with at times and profoundly disagree with at other times, the issue that leads him to call for what is, in fact, dangerous given the times as they are, a new convention, is the crisis that his fellow law professors and scholars have invented in investing the president with fascistic powers under the "unitary executive" which is a huge loop hole contained in the language of the "founders" along with their slave-power enhancing provisions such as the Electoral College, the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate and the idiotic provisions for lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court (getting rid of that is one of the things Levinson and I agree on).
All human documents, all human institutions, all human governments are as vulnerable to the corruptions as befell the Children of Israel who lived in the period after Moses gave them the far, far more radically egalitarian, far, far more humane and far more solidly grounded Law that is the origin of the Prophetic Imagination as I've been studying through Walter Brueggemann's great study of it. This topic, these times, the decay of American democracy under the reign of secular modern thought, instrumental reasoning, the industrial-scientific-rationalist model of reality could not possibly be more intrinsically linked. As I have pointed out numerous times, it wasn't to the Constitution and the founders that the effective struggle for equality went for its examples and its language, it was to the book of Exodus, it was to the Jewish Prophetic tradition, Moses, Hosea, etc.
That the article bewails the loss of "faith in the Constitution" ON THE RELIGION NEWS SERVICE SITE! is as telling as its "balance" in lines with "journalistic ethics" is such a clear demonstration of what I wrote yesterday that I'm just going to let you ponder that.
Note: New Blogger seems to be setting up new traps - either it or my unfamiliar handling of it. I am going to be surprised as you are with what goes up on screen, I suspect.
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