The Historical Argument for Impeaching Trump

By Heather Cox Richardson, Guardian UK

18 June 19

Since Nixon, Republicans have pushed the envelope under the guise of ‘patriotism’, and Democrats have tolerated it because of ‘civility’

he question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today’s Republican party with America’s traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.

Since Richard Nixon, Republican presidents have pushed the envelope of acceptable behavior under the guise of patriotism, and Democrats have permitted their encroaching lawlessness on the grounds of civility, constantly convincing themselves that Republicans have reached a limit beyond which they won’t go. Each time they’ve been proven wrong.

Nixon resigned in 1974 because his attempts to cover up his involvement in the Watergate burglary made his obstruction of justice clear. Republican leaders warned Nixon that if the House of Representatives impeached him, the Senate would convict. Republican congressmen of the time believed in the rule of law.

Gerald Ford’s subsequent pardon of Nixon was perhaps given in that spirit: when the law rules, it permits mercy. But the absence of a humiliating public exposure of Nixon’s participation in Watergate, and the lack of a permanent bipartisan condemnation, gave Nixon loyalists cover to argue that he wasn’t guilty of crimes. Instead they claimed Nixon had been hounded out of office by outlandish liberals determined to undermine him and the country.

Ever since, Republican extremists have employed this rhetoric whenever they break the law or erode constitutional norms.

When Ronald Reagan’s administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning – yet defended the principle behind the scheme. Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, pardoned the six leading figures of the Iran-Contra affair because, he said, “whether their actions were right or wrong”, they were motivated by “patriotism”. The investigation into their actions was “a criminalization of party differences”.

Yet, faced with the popularity of Democratic president Bill Clinton, who threatened to undermine conservative efforts to unwind the activist government Americans had supported since the 1930s, Republicans led by the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, did precisely what Bush Sr had ostensibly warned against. They sought to undercut Clinton by impeaching him for high crimes and misdemeanors after he lied under oath about an extramarital affair. (The public recognized that the charges were politically motivated, Clinton’s popularity only rose, and the Senate ultimately voted to acquit.)

But when George W Bush, a Republican, took office, Republicans once again deferred to executive lawlessness. In order to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, administration officials falsely argued that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To silence opposition, “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, unmasked a CIA officer. Libby was ultimately convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice; no one else was held criminally responsible for the disinformation used to justify the Iraq war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

During the Obama administration, partisanship once again trumped the law. Republican leaders under the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, set out to thwart Democrats – first by refusing to cooperate in crafting legislation, then by refusing to consider a Democratic supreme court nomination as required under the US constitution.

Even before the 2016 election, Republican officials told reporters that they planned to impeach Democrat Hillary Clinton as soon as she was elected for her misuse of an email server or her ties to the Clinton Foundation. McConnell then led Republicans in refusing to join President Obama and Democratic leaders in a bipartisan statement alerting the public that Russian intelligence was attempting to throw the 2016 election to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. This forced Democrats to accept the tilted playing field to avoid the appearance of partisanship.

Democrats kept largely quiet in the face of such bullying, afraid that Republican rhetoric would alienate voters and hurt their chances in 2016. Then Trump won.

The same Republicans who had threatened to impeach Hillary Clinton remained silent when, immediately after his surprise victory, Trump refused to abide by laws about emoluments or nepotism, openly profiting from the presidency and filling the White House with personal relatives. They continued to remain silent when Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey, who was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, then pointedly pardoned Scooter Libby, saying he was “treated unfairly”. They did not protest in February 2019 when the Trump administration openly defied the law by refusing to give Congress a required report on Saudi involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

By May of this year the White House was refusing to honor any congressional subpoenas on the grounds that “it’s very partisan – obviously very partisan”, as Trump told the Washington Post.

When the House committee on ways and means demanded Trump’s tax returns under a law that leaves no wiggle room, Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, nonetheless refused to deliver them, saying he saw no “legitimate legislative purpose” for such a request. An attempt by the executive branch to dictate to the legislative branch, the only branch of the American government that has the unilateral power to make law, is shocking, but Republicans stayed quiet. They also stayed quiet when Trump used declarations of national emergency to override laws passed by Congress, and on Monday the Trump White House asserted in court that Congress had no authority to determine whether the president has committed crimes.

Yet only one congressional Republican – Michigan’s Justin Amash – has called for impeachment.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, provided ample evidence that the president should be investigated for obstruction of justice in his attempt to quell the Russia investigation by firing Comey and urging aides to lie. At the same time, Mueller reminded Americans that the constitution charges Congress with presidential oversight. Indeed, under current Department of Justice policy, a sitting president cannot be indicted; congressional oversight is the only way to rein in a lawless president.

The Republican-controlled Senate will almost certainly not vote to remove Trump from office no matter how convincing the evidence of his criminality. But the process of impeachment by the House and a trial by the Senate would undercut the idea that prosecution is equivalent to partisanship. It would be a vivid illustration that American presidents – Republicans as well as Democrats – are bound by the rule of law and the US constitution.

The nation did not need such a demonstration in 1974: Republican leaders of that era forced their own president from office. Today’s Republicans will not do the same, and their complicity threatens to turn America into an autocracy.

Trump is certainly aware of the power that acquiescent Republicans have afforded him and that as soon as he is out of office, he can be charged with crimes. He recently told reporters he was different from Nixon because Nixon left. “I don’t leave,” Trump said. “Big difference. I don’t leave.”

Black Women, Let Your Anger Out

By Joshunda Sanders, In These Times

18 June 19

Chronic stress is killing us. We can’t keep repressing our rage.

t is an infuriating reality that Black women are encouraged to repress our anger even when we have so much to be angry about. When I sit weeping from anger in the office of a white male supervisor gaslighting me out of my job, when I show up as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle at an International Women’s Day event and am directed to the catering staff entrance (despite wearing a press pass), when my middle-aged white female supervisor passive-aggressively jokes that she fears I will replace her as she nears retirement age and then proceeds to fire me—I seethe silently and am reminded that to be a Black woman in America is to be constantly exposed to hostility inspired by one’s mere presence.

For years, I coped with this reality by smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot. I avoided feeling my feelings because I had no models for what it would look like to advocate for myself without unleashing the rage I had suppressed for so long.

In her 1981 keynote at the National Women’s Studies Association conference, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” poet and Black feminist author Audre Lorde introduced a pioneering intersectional vision of anger’s usefulness in coping with racism, classism and sexism. “My response to racism is anger,” Lorde said. “That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken. … Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over.”

While Lorde found some relief in expressing her anger, it comes at a cost. I have always felt the invisible pressure of respectability politics—the notion born in the Reconstruction era and championed in the Obama era that for Black people to be successful, to be worthy of the protections of white citizenship, we have to behave ourselves and assimilate to the dominant culture. Or, to use Michelle Obama’s famous mantra: When they go low, we go high.

The constant refrain of respectability politics, explicitly or implicitly, is that marginalized people must rise above racism and sexism and the emotions they inspire—such as anger, depression and anxiety—in order to gain favor from those in power. As such, Black women have al-ways been discouraged from expressing such emotions. In 2018, when tennis champion Serena Williams openly expressed her anger at a notoriously strict umpire, she was fined $17,000 and headlines generally portrayed Williams’ rage as an “outburst” unbecoming of a sports star.

Growing up, I was encouraged by my mother, even as a poor child in the Bronx, not to embarrass her by throwing a temper tantrum like some white children I saw screaming at Sunday Mass, for instance.

We never want to give white people—who already view us as immune to pain, as consistently and forever unequal—a reason to think we are irrationally upset, which is how anger voiced from a Black woman is usually construed. But the catch is that never expressing your emotions makes people believe you don’t have them or your feelings don’t matter. And it allows deeply rooted biases about race and gender to persist.

In the decades since Lorde gave language to a legacy of righteous rage, scholars and scientists have started to pay serious attention to the deleterious effects of the chronic stress caused by enduring racism and sexism, which wears Black women’s bodies down over time. Quite literally, this stress is killing us.

Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan, pioneered research on the psychosocial impacts of inequality by identifying a physiological “weathering” process, which “accelerates aging and increases health vulnerability. It is spurred by chronic toxic stress exposures over the life course and the tenacious high-effort coping [that] families and communities engage to survive them, if not prevail.”

This “high-effort coping” manifests in the body in bursts of adrenaline commonly known as a “fight or flight” response, when the nervous system kicks into high gear. In a 2017 paper, re-searchers Bridget Goosby, Elizabeth Straley and Jacob Cheadle found that the daily stressors that uniquely affect Black women trigger this response with deleterious consequences: “Because stress response systems are optimized to deal with immediate threats but can be harmful when continually activated… the need to constantly prepare for and adapt to stress accelerates wear and tear on the body (i.e., allostatic load).”

New studies are linking this higher “allostatic load” to the host of health issues disproportionately suffered by Black women: high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes-related deaths. Research also suggests that allostatic load is associated with Black women’s internalized and constantly affirmed sense of political and social powerlessness—and of the contrast between that powerlessness and the Strong Black Woman stereotype.

The result of knowing we are expected to be strong while also being among the least considered, lowest-paid people in society is “heightened levels of emotional distress that include frustration, anger and resentment,” write A. Antonio Gonzalez-Prendes and Shirley Thomas in their 2011 paper “Powerlessness and Anger in African American Women: The Intersection of Race and Gender.” For her 2017 dissertation, researcher Naomi M. Drakeford studied 210 Black women and found correlations between belief in the Strong Black Woman stereotype, emotional suppression and depression.

So what is to be done? If not even a celebrity like Serena Williams can voice her anger without being penalized, noncelebrities are certainly at risk. If we take up space with our justifiable fury, the negative consequences are myriad, from employment backlash to reinforcing stereotypes about Angry Black Women. If we suppress our anger, we risk validating a different, damaging caricature that paints Black women as feeling no pain.

There are some glimmers of hope: The Drakeford paper found that spiritual coping mechanisms decrease the negative health effects of adherence to the Strong Black Woman stereotype. There are also some local health interventions. In New York City, health officials have started racial sensitivity and culturally appropriate healthcare training in OB/GYN and maternity wards to stem escalating maternal deaths, for example.

But ultimately, the persistent problem of bias at the intersection of race and sex stems from a broader white supremacist culture that has reinforced notions of Black female inferiority for hundreds of years. Expressions of rage then allow racists and sexists to justify their bad behavior as existing only in the imagination of the survivor of their biases.

Health and longstanding biases aside, there are a number of political reasons Black women shouldn’t keep our anger bottled up. Lorde noted that suppressed anger undoubtedly helped white patriarchal power keep women silenced and angry at one another. “In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power,” Lorde said. “And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course, [expressing our anger] can destroy us.” But channeling collective anger—supporting Black women’s civic engagement and increasing representation in Congress, for example—is an important first step in the foundation for building sustainable political power. We saw this in the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, which began with the shared outrage of three Black women over the killings of Black men and boys.

But Black women’s expression of anger and suffering will not dismantle white supremacy on its own; it is only the alarm bell that signals the urgent need for change. Consider, for example, Stacey Abrams’ run for governor in Georgia. She embodies the concept of speaking truth to power, of expressing anger appropriately, but the manifestations of a racist and sexist political system (in the form of widely reported voter suppression) resulted in her being shut out.

Allostatic load gives the medical establishment’s imprimatur to a fact Black women have long known: Life under white patriarchy is wearing us down. To the extent there are political or policy solutions that could help reduce our chronic stress, they must include not only listening to Black women but hearing us.