There is no choice: Impeach him again

We lost two more this week. Subscribers, that is, upset with my choice to run articles from the Associated Press detailing the lies and deceitful statements of President Donald Trump and his supporters.

We saw the results of those lies last week with the attack on Congress as both houses gathered to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The nation’s Capitol was desecrated. Five people died, including a member of the Capitol Police. Senators and representatives fled or hid. The Secret Service whisked Vice-President Mike Pence to a safe location; the mob later came looking for him, chanting, as heard on video, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Staff of Nancy Pelosi hid in a room, locking and barricading the door, turning off the lights, and hiding under a table, just like they’d learned in school drills to respond to armed intruders.

The mob came to stop the certification of the new president, to stop the democratic transition of power. This wasn’t a protest; it was an insurrection encouraged by Donald Trump and his supporters.

I’m the type of person that likes to act slowly, with deliberation, but I don’t blame senators and representatives from wanting to get Trump out of office as soon as possible. They were attacked; their lives were in danger; the republic was in danger.

This opinion isn’t just the opinion of a far-left, ultra liberal newspaper editor. There are plenty of Republicans saying the same thing. Here’s this from Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times:

“The moral case is clear. Trump has the blood of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on his hands. Legal analysts can debate whether Trump’s speech met the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, but it’s irrelevant to an impeachment. Everyone except his most sophistical apologists agrees that Trump whipped up the mob.

“If conservatives want to have a moral leg to stand on as they condemn a siege of a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., or a police station in Minneapolis, they have an obligation to impeach him now.”

And this, also from Stephens:

“You’ll hear Republicans like the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, talk about the need for healing. Fine. But this sort of healing first requires cauterizing the wound. It’s called impeachment. Republicans mustn’t shrink from it.”

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, released a powerful video in which, as reported by Associated Press, he “compared the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol to the Nazis and called President Donald Trump a failed leader who ‘will go down in history as the worst president ever.’”

In the video, released on social media ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWvl-g_6rg) on Sunday, he recalled how his father and the people next door in Austria had fallen for Adolf Hitler’s big lie and had been eaten away by Naziism. He also called for national unity and said he would support President-elect Biden. It’s worth watching the video.

And there are these words, coming Tuesday evening from our own US representative from District 3, Jamie Hererra Beutler, in a press release and Facebook post: “The President of the United States incited a riot aiming to halt the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. That riot led to five deaths. People everywhere watched in disbelief as the center of American democracy was assaulted. The violent mob bludgeoned to death a Capitol police officer as they defaced symbols of our freedom. These terrorists roamed the Capitol, hunting the Vice President and the Speaker of the House . . . I believe President Trump acted against his oath of office, so I will vote to impeach him.”

So, Trump has just eight more days in office, as The Eagle goes to press, so why not just watch him leave and not stir up more rancor among his supporters?

Well, remember the election of 1876, in which Democrat Samuel Tilden outpolled Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Three states from the South sent competing sets of electors to the electoral college; to settle a close result, the parties formed a commission and came up with a deal that put Hayes in office but ended the Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Jim Crow Era followed that, and look where we are with that.

Do we need the same sort of result to come out of the Donald Trump era? No. Absolutely not.