U.S. Senate casts vote for nihilism
9 p.m., January 31, 2020
Here I’ve been working intermittently for weeks on drafts of Part III of Treading into Darkness—researching the effects of social media—and now the Senate Republicans (almost all of them) have made easy work of this installment. One of the most ugly gifts that has ever been handed to me.
The impact of the vote not to allow witnesses or documents in the impeachment trial is far broader than a judgment upon the person of Donald Trump. What the Senate has just done can be used henceforward by the executive branch to shield it from any investigation by Congress being performed in a timely fashion. That’s because the task of taking the subpoenas through the courts while being continuously obstructed can take months or even years. That’s exactly what the administration has been counting on with their refusal to turn over documents since last fall.
I can’t see the vote by the Republicans representing anything better than a descent into nihilism. Truth doesn’t matter, justice doesn’t matter, the checks and balances we thought were built into the Constitution don’t matter, the will of the American people (75% wanted witnesses) doesn’t matter, the idea that no one in America is above the law has just been completely trashed. And government by a gang of thugs has been validated.
A remedy will be long in the making
I don’t see how this precedent could be reversed without a constitutional amendment. This—if the will could even be found to do it—could take years. The difficulty of educating the American public on issues of political significance is daunting.
The other solution is for the blue states to secede from the U.S. That too would take years. I proposed this idea partly in jest back in 2017, but I’m not joking now. There are plenty of arguments against it, but the argument for it—that the United States is slipping into an autocracy—just got a hell of a lot stronger within the last few hours. Unification of the seceded states with Canada might be a workable option.
I’ve been agreeing with you for years that a blue state secession is about the only way we can preserve the Constitution. You may have been joking–I’m not. Alabama and Mississippi were not even on United States maps in 1787. But today they have the same two senate votes as New York and Pennsylvania, to say nothing of populous California (which was not on that map either, but which also proves the point ). The location of natural resources isn’t as important today as it was when there were no railroads, airplanes, etc. Besides, the greatest amount of the most crucial resource resides in the Great Lakes. So let those red states that voted for the horror of Trump and unlimited corrupt presidential power go pound sand!