A sampling of opinion (excerpts) from newspapers this morning on Senate Republicans' dismantling of the Constitution and political norms, in the service of the most corrupt, authoritarian, unhinged president in our history.
The Washington Post:
Americans
who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’
complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the
evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder
of that came Friday in a New York Times report
about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump
ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to
meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said
publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate
Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.
That
report underlined the cringing shamefulness of the Republican decision
to block Mr. Bolton’s testimony — and there will surely be more
reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters
who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by
showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much
as the bully in the White House.
The New York Times:
Senate
Republicans’ indifference to the overwhelming public support for
calling witnesses was of a piece with the party’s minority politics. Its
president lost the popular vote by three million votes. Its Senate
majority represents 15 million fewer Americans than the Democrats’ minority. In states like North Carolina, it rigs the maps to turn popular-vote losses into legislative majorities, then strips power from duly elected Democratic leaders.
And
just in case Americans want to register their unhappiness with
Republican leadership, the G.O.P. passes laws across the country to make
voting harder and discourage turnout. “I don’t want everybody to vote,”
Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, said in 1980. “Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
That
is becoming the rightful slogan of today’s G.O.P. leaders, who are in
thrall to a would-be autocrat, fearful of their own constituents,
desperate to lock in control of the courts and the nation's legal system
before a diversifying nation can pry their political authority away. [snip]
Make no mistake: The Senate may acquit Mr. Trump, but it will not, it
cannot, exonerate him. Mr. Trump is the most corrupt president in modern
times, a reality Americans will continue to be reminded of — by
continuing investigations by the House, which should immediately issue a
subpoena to Mr. Bolton; by a trio of cases in the Supreme Court that seek to reveal Mr. Trump’s shady finances; and, of course, by the behavior of the man himself.
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
Trump got a jump on his
end zone dance on Thursday, when he told a Des Moines rally that it was
“a happy period because we call it ‘impeachment light.’ ”
Sadly,
he’s right. What former President James Buchanan apocryphally called
“the world’s greatest deliberative body” didn’t bring the bodies to
deliberate. Instead, House managers had to rely on previous testimonies —
that is from those not blocked or intimidated by the White House.
“The
question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the
United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do
about what he did,” [Republican Sen. Lamar] Alexander wrote in his statement, adding: “Let the
people decide.”
And so
they will render a verdict, in November — on the president and his
Senate defenders, who failed to live up to Buchanan’s lamentably
outdated description of their institution.
We hope that verdict
can be rendered in November, but the events of the past 24 hours make it clear it will be a fight to make sure the election is free from interference and that the results will be accepted. Now more than ever, we can't afford to take anything for granted.
