Penny Thoughts: Is Our American Democracy in Jeopardy?

Unless you have been on a Norwegian River Cruise for the past few months, you are probably aware of the positions made by both political parties regarding their desires to preserve our American Democracy.  The Democrats have claimed that they are protecting our democracy by bringing impeachment charges against President Trump.  The Republicans reply with the fact that the Democrats are violating the Constitution and trying to re-write it, thus destroying our democracy.

It is a function and captive of perspective of course, but there are certain realities which cannot be denied.

Say what you will regarding President Trump, he has not been, nor will he ever be, the traditional “political” President who tries to have a kind, conciliatory word for everyone in every circumstance.  He is a street fighter – a rough and tumble businessman who has taken his inheritance and has built it into an empire.  He ran on a program to “drain the swamp”, a reference to the “business as usual” approach which has infected Washington, D.C., for at least the past three decades. 

The genesis of this “business as usual” methodology was laid by well-meaning liberal politicians who believed that government had the duty and imperative obligation to “assist” those who could not or who would not help themselves.  It has resulted in a monstrously monolithic welfare state.

Additionally, it has produced an obvious step towards socialism. 

Incidentally, Margaret Thatcher, the late and revered former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, observed that “Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money”.  Nevertheless, we have done our best to provide and maintain this plan to help those who need it.

In opposition to President Trump and his positions resides the Democratic position on their impeachment proceedings.  We have been reassured time and again that they want to preserve our democracy and that Trump violates it by acting as a “monarch”, for lack of a better word.  Even our Representative in Congress, the Honorable Terri Sewell of Selma, has declared, “The President, by his own admission, has endangered our national security and the very foundation of our democracy.”  Her position is common with her party, the Democratic Party.

Representative Sewell serves as a template for the Democrats in this instance.  She is, after all, a Democratic Super Delegate AND she saw fit to boycott President Trump’s inauguration in 2017.  Clearly these positions indicate a political perspective as it refers to impeachment. 

Impeachment is not supposed to be politically motivated.  This was one of the elements of the process which was a fear for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.  Both wanted a government with three branches imbued with a system of checks and balances to make certain that our Republic would stay intact.

Madison wanted the smaller states to have fair representation in the Senate and Hamilton feared the impeachment process would become far too political, thus polarizing the nation.  Hamilton wrote in The Federalist 65 that impeachment would very well  “agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.”

Both Madison and Hamilton feared a process in which the Senate could overturn a duly elected President, thus, effectively disenfranchising the will of the citizenry.  In a question presented by some colonists as the American Revolution was forming and the fear was a tyrant 1000 miles away in King George, “So why should I fear a tyrant 1000 miles away more that 1000 tyrants two miles away?”  It seems to me that in the recent impeachment actions of our House of Representatives we might pose the same question.

Clearly, the framers of the Constitution feared the misuse and abuse of the impeachment process, which would present a clear and imminent threat to our American Democracy.

From that perspective, it is painfully obvious that the democracy we have come to know and has become the benchmark for the rest of the world IS in more jeopardy than it has ever been. All the self-righteous pontification, all the scheming and prevarication, and all the equivocation cannot justify the continued assault on President Trump.

The nearby “tyrants” are intent upon overturning the 2016 election of a President.

Just as Madison and Hamilton had feared, the impeachment process has been highjacked and perverted into a weaponized course with the sole purpose of removing a duly elected President simply because they did not like the outcome of the election which brought him into the White House.  In plain terms, it is an attempted “coup”.  And it IS political!

The Democrats’ actions of deceit have been exposed by one of their own attorneys who declared in January 2017 that “a coup has started” and that it will lead to an impeachment.  And this was BEFORE President Trump’s inauguration! These foreboding predictions came from Mark Zaid, an attorney for the supposed “whistleblower”, who purportedly will offer “evidence” of President Trump’s wrongdoing.  Madison and Hamilton are undoubtedly turning over in their graves.

At the end of the day, nevertheless, the impeachment process as originally intended was to keep that system of checks and balances securely in place independent of political considerations.  The Republicans suffered as a result of their fervor of impeachment of President Clinton in 1998-99, even though he was guilty of perjury.  It was their fervor which did threaten the validity of the impeachment process and as a consequence was what Hamilton had feared.

The founders of our Nation and our Constitution were specific about the uses and intention of the impeachment process.  It was NEVER intended to be rooted in the loss of an election, the dislike of the President, or the ensuing rancor of either of these two facts.

If it is, we can only hope that it is not a portent of even more drastic consequences which will weaken our American Democracy.