Slate "This Is Not Representative Democracy"
The American people overwhelmingly favor conviction, and there is no chance the Senate will convict.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK
FEB 08, 20217:18 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/impeachment-stakes-not-conviction-senate.html
As the night before the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump falls, the mood is decidedly gloomy. While impeachment managers want to call witnesses and put on a proper trial, reports indicate that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have ordered up a quick and dirty affair. This makes a certain amount of sense given that there are other urgent priorities at hand and any hope of picking off the 17 GOP votes needed to convict has fully withered and died. No matter what case Democrats present, Republicans are almost certainly going to stick together and protect the former president. The weeks between the House vote and the Senate trial have only worked to ensure that this comes true. So what exactly is the point of this impeachment effort? If there is no chance of garnering a conviction, why bother?
In one sense, it’s long been clear that conviction isn’t the point when it comes to the now-multiple impeachments of Donald Trump. As the Democrats’ previous impeachment lawyer Daniel Goldman argued last week on Amicus, the purpose is to lay down a historical marker; to create a record, and force a vote for purposes of posterity if nothing else. And as my colleague Lili Loofbourow wrote back during that first trial of Donald Trump, impeachment is a stain that spreads.
But beyond the political message that House impeachment managers and Senate Democrats will convey at trial—that Republicans have opted, once again, to be the party of Trump and violent incitement and that his efforts to overturn both the vote and the Constitution are just fine—there is another vitally important message that will be conveyed this week, no matter the outcome. That message is less a political signal about the difference between the two parties so much as it is a five alarm warning about how representative democracy is working for Americans right now. Because in spite of the certainty with which I can predict that Trump won’t be convicted, recent polling shows that the majority of Americans want to see him convicted. ABC polling released on Sunday shows 56 percent of Americans saying that Trump should be convicted and barred from holding office again. Only 43 percent say he should not be. That means that most Americans watching any part of the impeachment trial could reasonably ask themselves why, um, yet again, 56 percent of the country is held hostage to a 43 percent minority. This is not representative democracy working well.
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In short, in addition to using this impeachment trial to create an historical record of four years of GOP support for a president who tried to violently overturn an election, this impeachment can also stand as a record of how staggeringly broken electoral politics is when the preferences of the clear majority of Americans are being subordinated by the very systems of government itself. The GOP isn’t just committed to ignoring the insurrection at the Capitol this week. It’s also increasingly committed to ignoring the majority of Americans who found the insurrection abhorrent. This, then, is what minority rule looks like in political theater form: A Senate trial in which the clear will of the people can be sidelined because the clear will of the people does not determine who governs, or what those who govern must do.
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last paragraph
There is vitally important, demonstrably do-able legislative work Democrats must prioritize in the coming weeks, in order to protect the franchise, to battle vote suppression, to curb gerrymandering, and to turn off the spigot for dark money in politics. But even as debate begins on those questions, we should look at the Senate trial as a natural experiment in government that has bent and twisted the instruments of democracy until it need not even bother to respond to voters, to existential violence, or to this small matter of irrefutable evidence they saw with their own eyes. Instead of fighting over whether the impeachment trial is somehow diminishing or distracting from the other important legislative work of repairing democracy, Democrats should be messaging that but-for this broken democracy, we wouldn’t have arrived at a place in which an impeachment trial is not only required, but also very likely to end in a shocking and un-democratic acquittal. This is what minority rule looks like. But only if we continue to tolerate it.
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