No American president has ever been convicted in an impeachment trial. President Mulligan slipped the constitutional noose a second time – what a talented boy! – on 13 February 2021, technically an “acquittal.” He of course trumpeted this as proof of his innocence and as complete exoneration. It was neither. Even to call it an acquittal is misleading, especially in this instance in which a handful of Republicans defected and most senators voted to convict and remove. The result more closely resembled a hung jury. The “acquittal” likely will become part and parcel of a GOP effort to cast the 6 January insurrection into the Sea of Oblivion. The vote was enraging and absolutely foreordained. A screed referring not to an article in the paper but to the news generally was sent to The Richmond Times-Dispatch, which passed. That one surprised me.
The Former President’s “Acquittal.”
And so ended the impeachment proceedings. The House Managers’ case was factually unimpeachable, constitutionally pristine, and rhetorically powerful, compelling to heart and mind. It eviscerated a defense fueled by mendacity, false equivalence, and faux outrage, a reflection of the defendant.
Yet there was no clarifying moment, no dramatic passage that would jar the deluded from their civic torpor. No Margaret Chase Smith arose from the GOP to uncover her party’s folly. No Joseph Welch crystallized the damage to public life from unabashed political indecency.
The Senate Minority Leader instead offered post-trial sophistry contorted enough to make a medieval scholastic theologian blush, political triangulation so transparent that he need hardly have bothered. He and forty-two Republican senators consigned their integrity to a blind trust. They seem unlikely soon to reclaim it.
Seven of their GOP brethren have been lauded for voting guilty. This sets the bar for civic virtue low. Conviction required only a sliver of conscience and a glancing regard for truth and still they find themselves vilified by their colleagues and the Republican base. Would Abraham Lincoln recognize his party were he to see it pound shut the coffin of accountability?
The salient question is how the GOP now will elevate the Big Lie. The party has inured its faithful to untruth: Tax cuts to the wealthy always create jobs and enhance revenues despite never having done so,[1] Saddam Hussein had WMD and “palled around” with Al Qaeda, torture comports with American values and invariably foils malign plots, Wall Street and financial deregulation had no hand in the Great Recession, the forty-fourth president was a Kenyan Marxist Muslim authoritarian, mainstream media purveys only “fake news,” coronavirus is a hoax, the 2020 election was stolen. Can Orwellian Doublethink be far away? Perhaps war is peace, falsehood is truth, guilt is innocence.
[1] Igor Derysh, “50-Year Study of Tax Cuts on Wealthy Show They Always Fail to ‘Trickle Down,’” Salon, 27 December 2020 (www.salon.com/2020/12/27/50-year-study-of-tax-cuts-on-wealthy-shows-they-always-fail-to-trickle-down/, accessed 27 December 2020); David Hope and Julian Limberg, “The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich,” International Inequalities Institute Working Paper 55, December 2020, London School of Economics and Politics (https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences_of_major_tax_cuts_published.pdf, accessed 27 December 2020).