Michelle Goldberg has some thoughts on the impeachment debate, and what it showed about America. Anyone who saw the Republican shoutfest should have had no trouble telling the difference between sides, but Goldberg saw something else as well.
...Anyone who pays attention to politics, however, knows that Donald Trump got around 63 million votes in 2016. That number has taken on a totemic significance for him and his supporters; any attempts to restrain his power are seen as a sin against the 63 million. During the long impeachment debate in the House on Wednesday, Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio, called for a moment of silence to “remember the voices of the 63 million American voters” whose will Democrats would defy, as if seeing Trump held to constitutional standards was a sort of death.
...If Trump is a martyr, who are his persecutors? You could watch the debate with the sound off and understand. All day, Republican speeches delivered by old white men alternated with Democratic speeches from women, people of color and young people. White men make up 90 percent of the Republican caucus and 38 percent of the Democratic one, and the day dramatized the representational gulf in the starkest visual terms.
With the sound on, you could hear fury and self-pity from the Republicans, along with, at times, outrage that Democrats would have the audacity to speak on behalf of American values. Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, brought with him one of those color-coded maps Trump supporters love, showing how their fewer 2016 votes were spread over much greater expanses of land. “We’re not being devoured from within because of some surreal assertion of the socialists’ newfound love for the very flag that they trod upon,” Higgins said. “We face this horror because of this map.”
emphasis added
The map referred to is this:
For the record, Hillary Clinton got 65 million + votes. Digby has her own write up of the disparity, and notes this:
You, of course, realize just how fatuous that map is. Rocks, trees and corn fields don't vote. People do. And here is the 2016 map [See the map at the top of this post] adjusted by population:
Throughout the debate yesterday Republicans evoked the "63 million" who voted for Trump as being a silent majority the Democrats were trying to suppress. They even held a minute moment of silence to "honor" them.
I don't have to remind you that in the real world, 66 million people voted for Trump''s rival and he only won the election due to 77,000 votes spread across three states that allowed him to eke out an electoral college victory.
Republicans know they are the party of a shrinking segment of the population. That is why they are taking steps to purge voters, make registration harder, demand IDs that can be expensive/hard to obtain for certain voters, aggressively tailoring voting districts, stole a Supreme Court Seat, and are now packing the courts with extremist judges who will continue their agenda for years to come. Let’s not forget Citizens United, Shelby County, Janus, or the Powell Memo. And who could forget Newton Leroy Gingrich and Language: A Key Mechanism of Control?
As Digby says,
We cannot forget that those angry white men on the House floor yesterday and the screaming crowds at Trump's rally yesterday still hold a lot of power. Their plutocratic patrons are working overtime to degrade the institutions that guard our democracy. While the fantasy White America Trump supposedly represents never existed and it's certainly not going to exist in the future, the true believers aren't going down quietly. It's will take everything the rest of us have to defeat them.
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[UPDATE: if this report at the NY Times doesn’t scare the crap out of you, you’re either brain dead or a member of the cult. Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party.]
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Impeachment is the tip of the iceberg if we are to address what the Republican Party is doing to this country to hang onto power. They are lately making much of the fact that “We are a republic, not a democracy” to defend their anti-democratic interpretation of the intent of the constitution and the founders. (Other words that come to mind include Kakistocracy, Kleptocracy, Idiocracy, Oligarchy, Theocracy, Fascism, Dictatorship...)
Going forward, we must address the consequences of an 18th Century relic like the electoral college crafted to address the concerns of 13 states with 3,929,214 people versus 50 states with 308,745,538 today. Think how different America would be today if we had had a President Al Gore, a President Hillary Clinton.
We also need to think about why a state with 39,865,590 people has as many Senators as a state with 577,737 and the role of the filibuster. (The Senate has been changed before.) We also need to remember how far we’ve come from the original vision of the founding fathers.
I’m going to give Goldberg the last word.
“Today, especially today, I reflect on the founding documents that have set us apart in the world, leading people across generations and across the world to risk everything because of their belief in our great nation,” said the Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a Constitution scarf around her neck, her voice charged with emotion.
Women and people of color, of course, were originally outside the protection of those founding documents. But on Wednesday, the most diverse Congress in history declared that even the most powerful white man in the world should be bound by them. When Republicans act as if that’s a sacrilege, they show us what they worship.
emphasis added
Okay, I lied. I’m going to give Charles P. Pierce the last word because, assuming you can get past the paywall, it’s a reminder of what America can be.