The Final Degradation

What is unfolding in Washington DC this morning should make no one proud.

It does not honor America – so little honor happens in our capital city anymore – and it certainly honors not the memory and long service and noble example of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This slavish, wild-eyed rush to judgment by the dutiful disciples of Donald Trump (see how they all fall in line) is but a blatant show of raw political power for its own sake. No one questions that the Party of Trump has the votes to do this. But it’s not right.

They may as well just dispense with the strained logic that Washington uses with itself, the pettifogging over precedent and the prerogatives of the majority. Please, spare us that now. We’ve heard it all before, and it still is not persuasive.

The difference this time is that the American people see Trump fully for what he is. And we see his allies in the Senate for what they are: They are, out of fear, his serial enablers. And no amount of hair-splitting over historical precedents will mask this now.

There is nothing high-minded nor noble about Donald Trump. Nothing.

And there is nothing honorable nor proud in how his cronies in the U.S. Senate throw palm-fronds at his feet.

If we have learned nothing else about our accidental President, we have learned this: There is no bottom level in the house where his mind lives, no lower limit to his disregard for the U.S. Constitution. For him, and his enablers, it is all a matter of transactions that benefit him.

They care not for our collective memory of RBG, one of the great champions of equality in human history, and the role model she became especially for millions of women and girls in our society. Instead, on this very weekend of her death, our memories of her long service must be polluted by low transactional politics - and worries across the nation of what our pandering president will now do to erase the lessons of her service.

Months ago I became weary of reading the lame commentary out of Washington that Trump “took over the Republican Party.” That’s not what happened.

What actually happened was this: The leaders we used to identify as “Republican” simply surrendered and walked off the field. They deserted the scene of conflict, rather than face it squarely. They simply joined his cult. Those honorable “leaders” are nowhere to be found anymore. They held the door open for Trump and his troops, and then - out of fear, anxious for their jobs - retreated into silence.

The current moment suggests a twist on the famous line from the Army-McCarthy hearings, when Senator Joe McCarthy was finally put in his place:

Question: Have you no shame, sir?

Answer: No, none. None whatsoever.

This silence has been shameless. Its effect might well be our ruin as a nation - but for one thing. The hope of America now arrives with our coming election, no matter how many of us vote by mail, no matter how long it takes to count us all, every one.

For all the worries and doubts that Trump and his scheming cronies have built into our voting this year, it is possible that he in his zeal and pandering to his base has also stumbled backward into handing the Biden campaign the biggest “October Surprise” of all.

This trampling on the memory of RBG may be the final outrage, the final degradation that activates voters by the millions and fills us with a solemn resolve.

© Keel Hunt, 2020