Let's Impeach Trump and the Corrupt System That Created Him

First, let me be perfectly clear where I stand on the issue of whether or not the United States Congress should impeach President Donald Trump: Yes, Mr. Trump should be impeached. For me it has nothing to do with the President soliciting foreign assistance to smear Joe Biden, though that is certainly worthy of censure.

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Mr. Trump deserves to be impeached simply because, as the pro-impeachment Congressmen in 1868 said of President Andrew Johnson, he has brought the office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace. He's mocked the responsibilities of the office almost daily since the inauguration, and has gotten away with it in large part because--like all abusive men at all times in history--he is surrounded by self-serving sycophants and enablers (think Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity). Only blind partisans cannot see that.  Meanwhile the modern day, holier than thou money changers at the temple will tolerate ANY actions of the President as long as he delivers them their preferred judges and tax cuts.

President Andrew Johnson was frequently portrayed as a buffoon in the print media of the late 1860s. The Congress impeached him on a range of charges, including the manner in which he brought the office of the President into contempt, ridicule and disgrace. Sound familiar?

But here's the problem: For an impeachment proceeding to be successful, it has to be carried out by a United States Congress that enjoys some degree of public trust. The 1998/1999 Congress enjoyed no such trust, which is why the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office was doomed from the start. Had Mr. Clinton been convicted in the Senate and removed from office, no thinking person would have thought of it as anything other than one corrupt institution (the Congress) carrying out a political hit job on another (the presidency).

We are in a similar position today: few people believe that the House of Representatives and US Senate, both of which for many, many years have been little more than what the late Frank Zappa called "the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex," possess the moral authority necessary to inspire the population to believe that removal of the President is necessary to ensure the sanctity of the Constitution. Our Constitution's been sullied, bullied and beaten up in bipartisan fashion for many decades now, in ways that arguably made a Donald Trump presidency inevitable.

How did we get to this pathetic point? Over the last 40 years scores of good books have addressed the dysfunction and moral turpitude of the United States government, but for me the one that has held up best is still journalist William Greider's 1993 classic Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy. Greider's book was one of the first to demonstrate, in the pointed and persuasive style of a seasoned reporter, how moneyed elites managed to take over our government and turn it into little more than an agent of those elites. Greider put it succinctly:

To understand the Republican party (or the Democratic party, for that matter), it is most efficient to look directly at the clients — or as political scientist Thomas Ferguson would call them, the “major investors.” On that level, the ideological contradictions are unimportant. Political parties do function as mediating institutions, only not for voters.

Bill Greider's book is a classic expose' of everything wrong in Washington. Since its release in 1993, the problems described by Greider--most notably the complete takeover of government by moneyed interests--has gotten worse at the federal level and infected virtually all state capitals too. 

When a government serves elites to the exclusion of the everyday citizens that they purportedly represent, that's called corruption.  And to put it bluntly, political corruption is perfectly legal in the United States. 

Can a corrupt institution impeach, bring to trial, convict, and remove from office an equally or even more corrupt President of the United States? Sure, but only when enough of the bad actors in that corrupt institution become convinced that said President no longer helps them serve their "clients."

What's needed is some kind of mobilized, grassroots effort to impeach our entire government. By that I don't mean voting out most of the incumbents--though that could only  help. Rather, it's time for all of us--regardless of ideological leanings--to start getting more solidly behind the effort to amend the US Constitution to reassert that our government is of, by, and for HUMAN BEINGS, not faceless corporations and wealth.

Impeach President Trump? Yes, but until we reform the corrupt system that gave birth to him, we'll still be fighting a steep uphill battle to make our government responsive to the needs of the masses.