Un-frickin-believable! Graham is worried about precedent if Trump is impeached? I'm choking on that.
Yes, I'm worried about precedent, too. We should all be concerned about the precedent. I'm worried that if he is NOT impeached or forced to leave office, even if it's only one day before the end of the natural presidential term, we will have established the precedent that whoever is elected to the office of the President of the U.S. will have carte blanche to take any action he/she wants without repercussion. The precedent we will have set is that the person we elect as president is above the law. We would call that autocracy. Or worse.
Before this week, I could have never imagined that our U.S. Capitol building would be breached by anyone, not ever, but now that it has, I am stunned to find that I can imagine other ways in which that same horrific scene might have taken place earlier in this presidency.
What if Mr. Trump had gathered these rabid supporters together earlier in the election season, say for example the day that he asserted that "Democrats would bring chaos to the United States if Joe Biden wins the White House in November." Or imagine if the president had said this to his followers after he had retweeted it, "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." Followed by his direction, "Now, let's go over to the Capitol and ..." And what? Kill some Democrats? His crowd came prepared to do harm that day.
The president has the power to lead another such group to riot again, during the remaining days of this administration. A person in a position of great power has great power to incite action, good or bad. Words matter! And I assert that the words of a president can reasonably be expected to carry more weight than mine ever will, and probably yours, too. It is impossible to absolve him from his responsibility in this terrorist attack.
The precedent that is established without any response will be that the Oval office gives the occupant license to conspire and to incite insurrection. The occupant of the Oval Office has ownership of these United States. We, the 382 million people who claim the U.S. as our nation, are merely game pieces on a giant Monopoly board that a president can play with when it suits him or her.
We have allowed this president to be aggrandized, to be lionized, and to serve as the leader of white supremacists in our nation. We have placed a libertine within the White House, and he has been exculpated at every step. He came into the White House without any plan to improve the lives of Americans, nor to protect the lives of Americans. His goals were to shore up the walls of our nation, to blame people of color for every conceivable ill, to accuse our international allies of stupidity, and to play games with our economy. We have let him do it.
When did we ever hear him state a "plan" other than, "I'm going to destroy everything Obama did." That wasn't a plan. That was a non-plan. "I'm going to build a great wall," was not a plan. He had no plan to fund the monstrosity, nor to explain how that wall would achieve anything. At best, it is a symbolic structure that drains our coffers and it provides this Mr. President with a medium upon which to paint his name and portrait. We have allowed far too much already. And for what?
A failure to act now to remove this man, will, I believe, mark the beginning of the end of the America that I love, a country where the rule of law and the laws that rule us as a nation have meaning. A country where we can disagree with one another and will defend the right of each other to do so. This is a country that prides itself on being intelligent, fair, innovative, and moral. We always like to believe that we are among the "good guys" of the world. Sadly, all of those things have been trampled nearly beyond recognition during this presidency.
This year, in particular, has proven that we pale in comparison to many other countries of the world. We have experienced a failure of leadership during this pandemic. The states have been relegated to bidding against each other for supplies. People of color in our country have been reminded time and time again that they do not matter as much as their white counterparts.
I ask you to imagine what the police response would have been if the terrorists that breached the Capitol had been black. In May, our president tweeted, "When looting starts, the shooting starts." He was talking about BLM demonstrations, that by and large, were peaceful gatherings in response to repeated murders of black men at the hands of police officers. There has remained a stark difference in the treatment of black Americans vs. white Americans ever since...since always. What a difference we witnessed when the crowd was white and armed.
To not remove this man now, and he is a mere man, from the highest office of our land establishes a precedent of carelessness and immorality within our Legislative Branch and within our country as a whole. Rather than helping our country to heal, it strikes yet another sharp blow upon us. It is short-sighted and rude. It is not an intelligent course of action. It is not fair, to anyone. It reeks of party over country. This is no way to run a democracy.
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