No More Impeachments

Hey, remember when it had been one hundred and thirty years since a President had been impeached? Remember those days? I do. I was fifteen years old and House Republicans were gearing up to impeach President Clinton over having an affair with an intern while in the White House and then lying about it under oath. 

Since then, I’ve seen two more impeachments (of the same President!) and now it appears that House Republicans- who don’t have anything better to do, apparently, are gearing up to endorse yet another Impeachment inquiry, because with the price of food and gas going up again, the country is definitely going to warm to a political party screaming about the BIDEN CRIME FAMILY for the next six months.

Impeachment as a political process has been rendered largely moot in the age of hyper partisan nonsense in which we live. It’s been reduced to political theater and is a massive waste of time and money so that one party (right now, it’s the Republicans, a couple of years ago, it was the Democrats and Trump’s first impeachment) can attempt to convince the far end of their base that they’re actually doing something, when in reality, they not going to wind up doing a damn thing. Even if, somehow they actually decide on articles of impeachment and vote them through, there’s not a chance in hell they’ve got sixty votes in the Senate to convict.

But, but, but, I can hear various people begin to splutter- what about the BIDEN CRIME FAMILY? What about HUNTER? (Freshly indicted on Federal gun charges, by the way.) What about the corruption?

I’ve got news for you, friends: nobody cares, because by now, everyone out here in the real world is quite aware that our politicians and so called political class of both parties uses public service to enrich themselves and become filthy rich in ways that would get regular folks like you and I thrown in jail at worst or an audit by the tax man at best. The question of whether Biden did any of the things the Republicans are screaming about is largely immaterial at this point. You don’t think the last Republican President was corrupt? You don’t think Republican politicians are somehow squeaky clean when they all wind up leaving office disgustingly wealthy or walking into corporate jobs that pay obscene amounts of money?

Come on, now. They all do it. We all know it

But it’s about accountability! No one is above the law! (I hear various people keep sputtering at me.) Forgive me, friends, but if that’s what you’re going to come back at me with, I’m going to need a minute to untangle my optic nerves and put them back into place as my eyeballs will have rolled so far back in by head they’ll have done a three sixty at how naive a take that is. Welcome to America. Do I think we should have a two tiered system of justice in this country? I sure don’t. Is anything the Republican Party doing actually going to fix that problem? No. Will impeaching Biden fix that problem? No. 

Of the three impeachments I’ve seen so far in my life, Clinton’s was a stretch because they didn’t have cross-partisan agreement on it. Democrats weren’t willing to take a walk up Pennsylvania Avenue the way Republicans were for Watergate and absent that, they should have censured him for it. Trump’s first Impeachment was largely performance art designed to appease Resistance Liberals who believed the Russiagate nonsense and Biden’s impeachment is shaping up to be much the same thing. Republicans have been digging around for months now and every conceivable smoking gun they’ve presented seems to have come to nothing, so other than appeasing the extremist end of their base, this too, will largely be a waste of everybody’s time.

In the wake of January 6th, immediate impeachment and conviction of President Trump would have be justified to me- not because of partisan reasons but for Constitutional/Historical ones. The Legislative Branch should have taken the moment to reassert their authority and send a clear and unambiguous message to The Executive Branch that the certification of elections will not be fucked with- directly or indirectly. The fact they didn’t is something that I sincerely hope doesn’t come back to haunt us.

Impeachment just doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t damaged a single President in any meaningful way. Trump remains inexplicably popular. Clinton left office with high approval ratings. Maybe you could argue that the hangover from Impeachment hurt Gore, but you could also argue a whole bunch of other stuff hurt him more in 2000. No one is going to have sixty votes in the Senate to convict. The hyper-partisan environment means that you’ll have next to zero chance of getting cross-partisan agreement on impeachment anytime soon, if ever. 

So we should stop doing it. 

If the Republicans in Washington were really serious about tackling a culture of corruption, they would bring pass a Congressional Stock Trading Ban. If they were serious about tackling corruption, they would require full transparency on every dollar spent on politics in this country, so the voters know exactly who’s renting their Congressperson. If they were serious about tackling corruption, they would slap a 75% surtax on all post-office earnings for at least half of the total time served in office. (So, if you serve 12 years, you get taxed for six.) If they were serious about corruption, they’d get behind a Constitutional amendment to ban gerrymandering. 

But they benefit from all of the above, so they’re not going to get serious about any of it and while regular people have to deal with another uptick in inflation, they’re get to play pretend that they’re solving a problem, when in reality, everyone can see that they’re doing nothing of the sort.