What the Rest of Us Must Do

I don’t know about you, but on Friday morning I had to take a long walk. For me, there was a lot to sort out from the night before.

As midnight approached late Thursday came the final confirmation, for any who might have needed it, that the Trump/McConnell Fix was in on the Trump impeachment. The Senate’s Trump Majority determined that the nation need not hear from any witnesses at all about what has happened in the White House. So firm and complete and unrestrained now is Donald Trump’s power over what used to be called the ‘Grand Ole Party.’ (What a quaint expression that seems this morning.)

Of course, this particular Fix was in from the beginning, yes? Only by Friday morning did we realize how thorough and unalloyed it has been. The Trump Party has had its 51-seat majority from the start. By midnight Thursday, no matter how exhaustive the House managers’ preparation for impeachment and trial had been, Republicans in the Senate fell in line, as Republicans do. And most of them didn’t bother to speak their reasons why.

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When I was a lad (meaning, in my younger 20s) I was assigned to be The Tennessean Washington correspondent for six months. I was part of a new rotation between full-time DC reporters, our most recent correspondent Elaine Shannon having departed for a job at a national newsmagazine.

This assignment worked out conveniently for me, as it came when I needed to be in the capital city as part of my journalism degree program. After the holidays, I would need to depart Washington for the main campus in Evanston, Illinois, for the final two quarters of my program.

So I was not there long, but I was there long enough. Plenty of time to learn for myself how our capital city is not a real city at all. Of course, there are DC neighborhoods that suffer and survive as the urban poor do in any U.S. city, but most of that is ignored by the governing class on Capitol Hill.

In my time there, Tennessee’s congressional delegation had a different character. Super-majorities were still largely Democratic, not Republican. Tennessee’s elected representatives were of both parties. The state’s delegation included Senators Howard Baker Jr. and Bill Brock, both Republican, but on the House side, the Democrats Joe L. Evins and Dick Fulton and Harold Ford Sr., among others. Different characters than now. Different times than this.

When I arrived in DC, I was quickly struck by how the place was always about work and politics, all the time. In the evenings after work, Hill staffers and journalists who covered their bosses would socialize but invariably even those conversations would return to work-day subjects, to politics, to the things most of us across America prefer to leave behind at the office when quitting time comes.

In today’s Washington, that aspect is still the same, only worse.

Most members of Congress hardly talk to those on the other side of the aisle, except at a few social events where fraternization won’t count and doesn’t matter. More generally, with a notable few exceptions, there’s very little real collaboration across the partisan line. And in that void, I imagine it must be so easy for a member to get so wrapped around the axle of procedure and ideology that little else matters. Exceptions are unusual.

Add to this the Trump Effect – his hammering via Twitter of any who might disagree or seem to stray, the collapse of the old Republican Party into a cult of worship or fear, the rise of the hair-trigger social-media trolls – and it’s little wonder so little good comes of it.

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I read yesterday that my friend Jon Meacham, the Tennessean and much-honored historian of the presidency, had observed of the current moment that President Trump is now “functionally a monarch” in view of the Senate’s acquittal of him.

The furthest any senator seemed willing to venture was to call Trump’s actions on the Ukraine affair “inappropriate” – but no censure.

Left unaddressed were any other aspects of the destructive effects Trump has had on our nation. The messages at midnight Thursday seemed to side-step the real trouble that Trump has unleashed. 

It seems to me not enough simply to bemoan the culture wars, when a full airing of facts might have helped all know how best to vote in nine short months. There is still time for that; we just cannot look to the Senate for any help.

Senators might have voiced at least a little concern of what presidential behaviors they were condoning, what kind of future they were accepting. You would think. But they did not. None of that.

o

On this Sunday morning, the prospect of an even less-restrained Trump paints a very dark picture indeed. It is an image of danger. It is a specter of a different country.

My answer this morning: So now we must vote. All of us.

And we can help others know how important it is to register, and to vote. The real heroes of the moment are not politicians but the many souls who are leading the registration drives – city by city, state by state – especially among young people who will vote for the first time.

This is the action that counts and will matter most for our country.

Voting is what the rest of us must do now.

o