After 229 Years Of Deliberation The Verdict On The Actual Character Of American Democracy Is About To Come In

One of the things that I've done since I started making comments online is to continue something that I've been doing since the Reagan administration, arguing that the modern American conservative identity was in many if not all cases, actually a fascist movement.  The claims about  conservatives favoring limited government that my opponents in those early debates would throw out as a refutation against me is about to face the ultimate test and I have every expectation that the modern conservative movement will test out as fascists.

The filings by prosecutors in the case of Michael Cohen present evidence, strong evidence that Donald Trump is sitting as president while being guilty of serious crimes that, allowed to stand, will be the death of even the vestiges and pantomime show of American democracy.  Him remaining president, not removed by impeachment will confirm the actual nature of the American system as fascism under the control of a Republican Party which intends to wield fascistic power through elections corruption and fascistic propaganda in the mass media. 

I listened this morning to the video of Lawrence O'Donnell, correctly but perhaps a bit disingenuously,  pressuring Congressman Steve Cohen, a Democratic member of the House Judiciary  Committee to say that he will pursue impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, not making him the first American President credibly accused by federal prosecutors of committing serious crimes without impeachment hearings in the House being mounted. 

Cohen's answer that the Democrat's decision on impeachment would depend on Republicans agreeing to impeach a Republican president was the honest political answer to that question.  Congressman Cohen, like Nancy Pelosi, like congressman Nadler, are members of the House, they are politicians, that they see this in political terms is not wrong.  They have to be more realistic than a lawyerly, judicial view from the bargain-brand Mt. Olympus that the law takes.   It would be meaningless to mount an impeachment against Trump without the possibility of removing him.   The political reality of what that might cost Democrats in 2020 is a responsible consideration. 

O'Donnell's response that the Republicans are a party that won't shoulder responsibility was also honest.   His point that Democrats would leave that decision to Republicans if they failed to try to do the impossible is also true.  But it holds that Democrats in 2019 try to do what will be impossible without Republicans agreeing to do what they won't do.

I have held for decades that the idea of removing an American president by impeachment was a Constitutional fiction, a myth which has never been done despite presidents who have done everything up to and including causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people for their own political gain.  That atrocity started with Andrew Jackson who, surprisingly, was in violation of court rulings in his program of genocide and land theft in the removals of the Cherokees and others, it continues throughout our history, it has actually accelerated during my lifetime in a series of Republican Presidents, Nixon (the closest we have come to making the Constitution work) Reagan,  Bush I, Bush II and now Trump.  Of course, Bill Clinton was impeached for the most trivial and for the most partisan of real reasons that he was a Democrat who won over a Republican.  And he was impeached in the clearest of possible set-ups with paid liars and the most overtly partisan special prosecutor in the history of that office, Ken Starr appointed by corrupt judges, Sentelle working hand in glove with Senator Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth to engineer that. 

Now, in 2018, after two hundred, twenty-nine years of struggle to make a democracy out of the racist oligarchy the founders set up, we are at the clearest test of whether, ultimately, a "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,"  is possible under the United States Constitution and it is those who claim to revere that Constitution the most who are proving that, left to them, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall" perish from at least the United States. 

American conservatives have a matter of weeks to prove that they will insist that Republicans hold Donald Trump accountable for the highest of high crimes against American democracy or we should all admit that the United States Constitution is not what it was sold or is sold as being.  I would say if it hasn't happened by February first, we will have that answer.  That answer is likely to be that The Constitution isn't a vehicle for equality and democracy, it is as much a covenant with death as Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists discovered, to their horror, it was as soon as the papers and other writings of the framers of the Constitution started to be written. 

One of the landmarks in my understanding of this didn't come from Republicans, it came from two of the great iconic figureheads of the Democratic Party,  Senator Edward Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy gave Gerald Ford the "Profiles in Courage" award specifically for his pardon of the criminal Richard Nixon in 1974, short circuiting the Constitutional remedy for presiential crime, impeachment.

That act, including both the pardon and the establishment reaction to it, as read in the media, in books and as lauded by the Kennedy family, was the beginning of my ever increasing skepticism of the Constitution.  Gerald Ford's pardon was one of the most damaging acts in the history of the United States it cemented the idea that even a proven criminal as president was, in fact, above the law.

It was an act of partisan character, the pardon was an act performed by a man who Nixon, himself, elevated to be in a position to assume the presidency from him, it stank of the very real possibility of the ultimate quid pro quo and it still does.  It stank of unequal justice, a pardon granted to a man who enthusiastically used racist paranoia and the popular prejudice against Black men as an inherently criminal class who was a proven criminal of the most serious kind.  And Edward and Caroline Kennedy rewarded the pardoner, calling what he did "courage". 

No, barring something verging on the miraculous - its uniqueness would justify that designation -  this Constitution is about to prove that it has always been as dodgy and fraudulent as its critics have always held it to be, as so many Black People, First Nations people and so many others have never had a reason to suspect other than that due to their treatment, under law, under the Constitutional system.  Donald Trump will get off because of Republican-fascism and Democrats will take the blame for that because they are left powerless under this system to hold Trump responsible for the crimes he is guilty of.  Not least because of the mass media which O'Donnell is one of the better people in it. 

The whole thing stinks, that smell is the smell of dead and decaying democracy. 

Note:  I've been studying the history of the Whig party and one thing that is becoming obvious to me, various stands and positions in politics, in relation to partisan labels, get jumbled and assigned with about the same predictability as drawing Scrabble tiles.   And that at any given point the diversity of members of a party will ensure that any holding of what that party stands for will be anything from generally and vaguely true to totally unjustified.  I do think that today's Republicans,entirely unlike those in the period up to the death of Lincoln, are a fascist party by their own actions and inactions.  "Fascism" as a reality isn't a peculiarly 20th century innovation anymore than Nazism can be separated from the currents that fed into it.  I think it's clear that the indigenous forms of that stuff present from the 19th century and earlier should be considered continuous with it.

If you want to get a real shock, look at what the Republican Party stood for at its founding in the 1850s and up till the death of Lincoln and how fast it turned into a cesspool of corruption starting in the Grant administration and, especially, as Hayes bought his way into the presidency through the corrupt deal made possible by the founders' Electoral College system.   Then consider how many elections during our lifetime were decided by the Electoral College and the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

"Profiles in Courage" is one of the most dishonest books of popular history I've ever read.  The chapter dealing with the non-impeachment of Andrew Johnson alone would ensure that.  The one about Robert Taft's opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the basis of legalistic fussiness was even worse.  That whole mindset needs to be seriously questioned, the Award should be scrapped until they justify its existence.