Summary: The shit is about to hit the fan in Washington City. As an increasingly unstable Donald Trump is more and more found to have abused the powers of his office in an attempt to gain political leverage against the Democratic front runner and former Vice President Joe Biden, the tide has begun to turn toward impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had widely been perceived as unalterably opposed to impeachment, now seems to be moving slowly, surely, “with evident qualities of conduct, if not a part, toward the manifest purpose of the nation.” The announcement by the Speaker of a formal impeachment inquiry is a good first step.
But, the Democrats, always prepared to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, may very well let Trump slip away from them because of their ideological propensity for self-defeating behavior, for bringing, as sometime Republican strategist Rick Wilson has said, a soup ladle to a knife fight. Democrats need to reassess their partisan orthodoxy. When they go low, we don’t go high, pace Michelle Obama, rather, when they go low we meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
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Cathedral City, September 24, 2019 -- If what we have been seeing in the news today and over the last couple of days is any indication, the defecation is about to hit the ventilation in the capital of the nation.
The latest in a string of scandals facing the Trump presidency appears to be doing a lot more than merely causing some passing agita in the Trump White House. This latest scandal, in which Trump has been implicated in attempting to bully the President of Ukraine into complicity in an effort to gain political leverage against Democratic front runner and former Vice President Joe Biden, seems to have been a metaphorical straw that, in Washington-speak, severely adversely affected the structural integrity of the dromedary’s spinal structure. We do not know yet whether this scandal will be the straw that really broke the camel's back, but we do know that as of this afternoon, it appears to be the thing that finally pushed the ever-cautious but ever-politically savvy Nancy Pelosi into going to her House Democratic caucus to propose a formal impeachment inquiry into the President of the United States.
Now it is beyond doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Donald Trump is the most corrupt, venal, compromised, “individual one” ever to occupy the office of president of the United States. He manages to make Chester Alan Arthur, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Richard Milhous Nixon appear by comparison to be almost men of probity. Now Speaker Pelosi had been rightly cautious about proceeding with an impeachment inquiry on the state of the facts as they existed when Robert S. Mueller presented his report. Though many of us believed that the Mueller report constituted, at the very least, ample evidence of probable cause to believe that Donald Trump had committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” sufficient to justify impeachment proceedings, I, unlike many Democrats, believed that we needed to let “Miss Nancy,” as Speaker of the House, be in the driver’s seat. It’s easy for Democratic activists in the metaphorical provinces to insist upon precipitous action. It is easy for Democrats in the provinces to shout “off with his head,” or “lock him up!”
But “Miss Nancy” is a cleverer politician than most people give her credit for being. “Miss Nancy” has not risen to the Speakership of the House not once, but twice, without knowing how to play the often Byzantine games of Capitol Hill politics without placing herself or her Democratic caucus at unreasonable risk. “Miss Nancy” is a master of the art of war in much the same way that Sun Tzu mastered it 2500 years ago during China’s “Warring States” period. The Speaker understood the importance, as the Taoists put it, of watchful waiting. Coming as she does out of the politics of San Francisco, much of which is influenced by the Chinese Six Companies, Miss Nancy understands the Taoist concept of wu wei, a "technique by means which the one who practices it may gain enhanced control of human affairs." In short, the Speaker has taught us a master class in the art of doing nothing, by which everything is done.
However, before we get lost in the weeds of Chinese philosophy of the Spring and Autumn period, let us return to more immediate political considerations. While practicing her wu wei, Madam Speaker had, in all likelihood, an understanding that sooner or later, The Donald would do something so breathtakingly stupid, so butt dumb, as my West Texas grandfather used to say, that he would deliver himself into her hands and those of the Democratic caucus in the House, while at the same time putting Republican senators in the position California politics calls a “Drill:” a situation where no matter how you vote, or what position you take on a given issue, you’re bound to piss off at least one powerful constituency that you can’t afford to alienate. And while The Donald was, depending on what metaphor one chooses, either shooting himself in the foot or cutting his own throat, there was Miss Nancy, sitting silently on the sidelines, possessing herself with perfect equanimity.
And as Miss Nancy has waited on the sidelines in perfect equanimity, sustained by the teaching attributed to Sun Tzu that if one waits by the river long enough, the bodies of one’s enemies will float by, exactly such a thing has begun to happen. As a veritable parade of Trump flunkies, sycophants, and hangers-on, including sometime campaign chair Paul Manafort, ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn, ex-campaign flacks George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, disciplined attorneys Michael Cohen and Alex van der Zwaan, has trooped into and out of various federal courthouses to face a series of federal criminal charges, the Speaker and her caucus had to do little but wait for the evidence to continue accumulating.
Yet, at some point, even so suave a political operator as Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, raised among the full contact, no holds barred, politics of Baltimore City and San Francisco, had to realize that, to overwork a weather metaphor, the winds had shifted and the tide had turned. Put another way, the overwhelming evidence Miss Nancy had declared she needed to see before coming around to supporting impeachment proceedings has now manifested itself. The coming days will see whether the Democrats can find their courage, put the Republicans in the Senate through a Drill, and lay the groundwork for driving The Donald the hell out of the White House.
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Of course, while, or if, the Democrats and Justin Amash are laying the infrastructure for the constitutional overthrow of Donald J. Trump, they should also be prepared to acknowledge, to themselves and to the country at large, that the time may be at hand to face up to the necessity of a clear eyed reappraisal and possible rehabilitation of the legacy of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
It is long been a steadfast article of received orthodoxy among American liberals and on the American left that anything having to do with Joe McCarthy was saturated with unspeakable right wing evil. For years, Democrats and leftists alike inculcated their posterity with the idea that McCarthy had been wrong, and that even to suggest that the United States might be the target of Soviet and now Russian meddling, agitprop, and information warfare was inadmissible, wrong, and simply unacceptable.
As recently as 2017, one who suggested that we and our public institutions of self-government were under attack from Russia was to invoke pooh-poohing, tut-tutting, and assurances — usually uttered in a patronizing and superior tone — that any such talk was “McCarthyism.”
Indeed, so well known was the thralldom of the Democratic Party to its orthodoxy about Joe McCarthy that our enemies, both foreign and domestic, were able to use the invocation of “McCarthyism” to evoke what amounted to a Pavlovian, conditioned, self-sabotaging response for a great many people on the left side of the aisle. When Donald Trump was whining about how “unfairly” he had been treated by the American intelligence community, he invoked the tiresome trope of “McCarthyism.” When Julian Assange was engaging in his self-aggrandizing, Russia-assisting, behavior from his shit-smeared bedroom in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, he frequently invoked the trope of “McCarthyism” to try to deflect scrutiny of his wrongful conduct and to excuse his crimes.
Both Trump and Assange were, and remain, convinced that any invocation of the McCarthy trope would cause Democrats to curl up in a ball, wet themselves, and float away on their own fear pee. Now, many Democrats, in fact far too many Democrats, remain willing to do just that. These Democrats continue to pooh-pooh the existence of Russian active measures against the United States, and they will tut-tut and dismiss — in those patronizing and superior tones to which they are so well accustomed — us Democrats who have got over our fear of being called McCarthyite.
We Democrats who think the salvation of the country is important, and who are flatly unwilling to go down without a fight, are willing, when the Republicans go low, to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. In that regard, we are different from those Democrats who are willing to accept defeat, as long as their precious principles are intact. We fighting Democrats are willing to own up to the importance of a nuanced reappraisal of McCarthy’s legacy.
For years, prevailing Democratic and left orthodoxy postulated that there was no real cause for worry during the 1950s. That orthodoxy denied the reality of Soviet subversion. It denied that the Rosenbergs were guilty; it denied that Alger Hiss was guilty; it denied that the Soviets were engaged in active measures of any kind against the United States. We Democrats need to discard that orthodoxy. We need to be forthrightly the Party of national security.
Moreover, as much as we, the Democratic Party, need forthrightly to position ourselves as the Party of national security, we also need to be willing to countenance investigations of subversion, foreign and domestic, at every level. We need to look carefully at the behavior of the Republican national committee. We need to investigate the crap out of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the fashion in which Facebook turned a blind eye to massive and repeated ad buys from Kremlin-linked foreign entities while Zuckerberg pooh-poohed the possibility of Russian interference, and Facebook’s flirtation with Cambridge Analytica.
William Barr, Mike Pompeo, and the rest of the Trump cabinet should be investigated and interrogated before Congress. The attorneys in Donald Trump’s orbit should be investigated by their jurisdictions of licensure and subject to professional discipline up to, and including, disbarment.
Finally, since it is so terrifyingly obvious that one of our major political parties has been playing footsie with the bad guys, it may well be time to revive, either under that name or some other, the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a standalone committee, and not as a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. It will take a dedicated committee of the House, staffed and resourced as such, to get to the bottom of the corruption, the malfeasance, and the treason of which Donald J. Trump and his administration are so manifestly guilty.
Speaker Pelosi’s announcement today of a formal impeachment inquiry is a good first step. Every journey of 1000 miles begins with a first step. The salvation of America must be undertaken.
Now.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own. Any Democrat who wants to pooh-pooh his views is welcome to do so, at the acknowledged risk of being belabored upside the head by a cast-iron skillet.
