Nothing matters.
It’s been hard to avoid that feeling the past few years. It doesn’t matter if our president brags about assaulting women, uses the White House to enrich his businesses, pays off a porn star, hires his children, praises and hires white supremacists, colludes with Russia, puts children in cages, blows up the deficit, overturns the precedents and protocols that hold our fragile democracy together.
Given all this, it’s a little easier to understand why many don’t take impeachment seriously — it’s hard to get too excited about Trump simply holding U.S. aid hostage until a foreign president investigates one of his political rivals.
Not that impeachment will matter. Trump is protected by the most powerful politician in the country, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s shame, who on Thursday threw what little was left of his reputation to the winds of history with the most audacious, ludicrous, gaslit speech in his long career of such statements.
The man who first thought of stalling federal appointments to make a political point and later turned precedent upside down by denying President Obama the Constitutional right to appoint a Supreme Court justice actually had the nerve to call out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for possibly delaying sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Pelosi’s call to delay until the Senate trial rules are established is politically risky, but it’s also one of those parliamentary parlor tricks worthy of McConnell himself. The man who swore (unsuccessfully) to make Obama a one-term president actually said impeachment was fatally flawed because “a political faction in the lower chamber have succumbed to partisan rage.”
The man who constantly declares his love for Senate protocol now rejects his Constitutional duty as an impartial juror in the Senate trial. As noted legal writer Dahlia Lithwick wrote on Wednesday: “Rule XXV of the Senate rules in impeachment trials states ‘I solemnly swear (or affirm) that in all things appertaining to the trial of ————, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.’ Yes, there it is, right there, in the rules. And therein lies the problem we seem to be having. Three years after Merrick Garland was denied a hearing and vote, we continue to believe that the norms, or even the rules mean anything. Yes, Senate ‘rules’ suggest that senators should behave as unbiased jurors. But rules are not enforceable if nobody cares to enforce them.”
“The rules are not enforceable if nobody cares to enforce them.” That is a powerful statement that shows just how far McConnell and the Republican Party have come in putting politics above country. Our country was still founded on the fragile ideal that our elected officials would do the right thing, but if they don’t, there’s little that can be done.
Not that it matters. McConnell will keep flouting precedent and doing whatever he chooses to enforce his agenda. No one should be surprised. It’s happened his entire political career.
Sure, here in Kentucky, we have benefited from McConnell’s thirst for power and votes. He and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, have brought home the bacon on a regular basis, millions here and there, to cement his re-election campaigns. McConnell’s soul has been so completely subsumed that he seems not to care that his dignity, reputation, place in history will be praised only by Fox News.
And that brings us to the only thing that could possibly matter: defeating McConnell next year. Sure it’s next to impossible. The man who first began the erosion of democracy through the destruction of campaign finance laws, knows exactly how to spend all that corporate money and how to quickly destroy his opponents. (Fun fact: in 1973, McConnell wrote an editorial in the Courier-Journal calling money in politics a “cancer.”)
Defeating McConnell — and Trump for that matter — will require a perfect campaign and even higher turnout than we saw in the recent governor’s race. Although McConnell’s approval ratings in Kentucky are consistently underwater, he hasn’t alienated as many people as Matt Bevin did, and huge name recognition. Nonetheless, it could be the most important election in the country after Trump’s.
Later in her article, Lithwick made another point: “Americans who may not be completely up to speed on the arcane language of Senate oaths, or the complexities of Trump’s pay-to-play Ukraine scheme, are nevertheless well-aware that if the Senate throws the impeachment trial to the White House counsel, something has been profoundly broken in this framework of constitutional democracy. Once the framework is dissolved the ‘rules’ are mostly just hood ornaments.”
That will be McConnell’s legacy. Meanwhile, he and today’s GOP know that it’s only a matter of time before they face demographic defeat. By next year, according to the Brookings Institution, the nation’s entire under-18 population will be majority non-white. McConnell and his minions have made it clear that nothing will matter in the quest to cling to power, even if it means supporting a president as unfit as Trump. McConnell’s defeat might be the only thing that could stop the continued unraveling, the only thing that could make facts and rules matter again.