In wake of the New York Times conditionally endorsing not one but two Democrats for president this weekend, I was going to go over an analysis of where the still dozen-odd candidates stand before Iowa. But that’s gonna take me a little bit of time.
So I’ll mention a couple of current events in passing. First, on Tuesday January 21, the Senate proceeded with the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, Viceroy of Russian North America. The main news in a trial that Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell desperately wants to be over with as soon as possible is that, after first announcing that arguments would only have 24 hours over two days to proceed – two 12-hour shifts starting at 1 pm – he relented and agreed to stretch the 24 hours over three days in 8-hour shifts.
Now, I would not expect a Senate with a Republican majority to remove a Republican president. In the last impeachment, a (slim) Republican majority failed to convict President Bill Clinton. The removal of an impeached president requires a very high standard, and it is unlikely to be met even if the Republicans were not a bunch of goosestepping party hacks determined to avoid even the most blatant facts to protect their political machine. They ARE, but the fact that McConnell made even this much concession indicates that enough sensible people in his party know that publicly announcing themselves as goosestepping hacks for a political machine might hurt their re-election campaigns.
This is another reason why McConnell, even more than Nancy Pelosi, didn’t want things to get to this point, because if she was politically obliged to push for impeachment (after having a set of undeniable facts), he is politically obliged to force an acquittal in denial of undeniable facts. And that means that when the Senate refuses to judge the facts, it becomes the Senate that is on trial, and their jurors are their voters. And this year there are 35 Senate seats up for grabs, and Republicans have to defend 23. Democrats only need to pick up a net four. As a practical matter, whoever is in charge makes the rules, but also as a practical matter, they at least want to pretend to the rule of law over partisan advantage, and the blatant assertion of bad-faith arguments only goes so far.
This issue of political bad faith touches on the other observation I had. The trial of course did not start on Monday because this Monday was the official three-day weekend for Martin Luther King Day. This also happened to be the day before the Virginia Commonwealth Senate approved, as previously announced, SB 240, a bill allowing the state to remove firearms from “persons posing substantial risk”. In response, various groups announced a rally on Martin Luther King Day to protest the bill. Prior to January 20, Governor Ralph Northam actually declared a state of emergency due to alleged threats from armed protestors. Well, the event came and went Monday, and everything proceeded rather peacefully. And while a lot of right-wing media, including of course Reason magazine, emphasized that people protesting for their rights ought not to be considered a huge threat to the system, various other media emphasized how most of the protestors went outside the designated no-guns public protest space to wear not only guns but camouflage military gear.
It simply demonstrates that this country really is two enemy camps, one of which is literally armed and the other of which is starting to think that’s a good idea.
Of course if you follow Antifa – or Rage Against the Machine – you know that having a regard for political self-defense is not exclusive to the Right. And while Antifa activists were at pains to avoid the Virginia rally “citing serious safety concerns” and to avoid being associated with the right-wingers, the fact that such leftists exist means that the various Facebook liberals who call gun-rights people “fascist” while insisting that Antifa have nothing in common with fascist tactics once again have to come to a reckoning with cognitive dissonance. Be that as it may, it was very easy for liberal media to tag the protestors as a bunch of wannabe paramilitary fascists, because that’s how they intended to present themselves. Home self-defense, let alone hunting, doesn’t require guerrilla-warfare displays, and you can’t be surprised when other people feel threatened by an armed show of numbers. Not only that, Dr. King was murdered, by a racist, with a gun, in the South, and choosing MLK Day to make such a display might come off as bad form.
Keep in mind, the only reason the Right (and incidentally aligned leftists) even had to have this protest is because Virginia’s government switched to a Democratic majority as of the last election (which in Virginia is held in odd-numbered years). So it can’t be surprising that once Democrats got elected they actually set out to keep their promises. Well, maybe it might surprise you if you kept chanting “Lock Her Up” and “Mexico Will Pay For The Wall” and yet Hillary isn’t locked up and Mexico isn’t paying for Trump’s wall. The fact that the election was just last year ought to indicate the strength of the Republican Party in what was once a reliably conservative state, and indicates that this is what we can expect in the future. So if gun rights are an issue to you – or if that is only one issue along with “fetus rights” and pro-business policy – it behooves you to not vote for a party that undermines its case by saying that the rest of the country is the enemy, their political rights are a threat to yours, and if you are not allowed to rule unchallenged, you may take it to the streets.
Oh, that reminds me, Trumpniks – you sick of winning yet?