US President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech in the chamber of the House of Representatives in Washington on February 5. Photo: AP
Opinion
Opinion
by Robert Boxwell
Opinion
by Robert Boxwell
Despite the Trump impeachment trial and State of the Union saga, American democracy is far from broken
While last week might have been a dramatic one in American politics, it also shows that the checks and balances written into the Constitution are working
Hysterical, dishonest, hyper-partisan politicians, however, threaten the system
What a chaotic week for US democracy last week was. An “epic fiasco” – as The New York Times termed it – of an Iowa caucus on Monday. A shredded State of the Union address on Tuesday. A presidential impeachment trial acquittal on Wednesday. Democrats cheering for a Republican senator they loathe on Thursday. And, on Friday, a debate among seven candidates whose salient campaign message is that they’re not Donald Trump.
Oh, and that they’ll give you the money they take from rich people.
You’d think American democracy is on its last legs if you read the US press. The largely liberal media hate the man in the White House more than anyone since Richard Nixon. Well, OK, since the last Republican president. But they really hate this guy.
Last week’s big story, of course, was impeachment.
Even before Trump took office three years ago, the Democrats and much of the media shifted into jettison mode to get him out. They began using terms like “dictator”, “king” and “fascist” to describe him. These are terms they usually reserve for dictators, kings and fascists, so Americans were understandably alarmed.
Our democracy was at stake, they told us, over and over.
Fortunately for Trump-haters, Russia meddled in the 2016 election, a justification for war if ever there was one for the American press, given that meddling in elections is their job. So, with the help of some strategically timed – and possibly illegal – leaks of federal documents around the time Trump took office, and his own ill-timed, ill-advised firing of FBI director James Comey, Democrats and the press managed to bring about the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate whether Trump had colluded with the Russians to win the election.
Once the Mueller investigation began, in mid-2017, the relentless din of Trump-criticism that accompanied it helped flip control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats in November 2018. This guaranteed that they would launch as many investigations as needed to make Trump’s life hard. It also brought to the House four far-left, radical Congresswomen, one of whom promised, sober, to “impeach the motherf****r!” The partisan exuberance of these four moved Democrats sharply left. They’re still there.
After almost two years, the Mueller investigation flopped in April. That’s one of the risks you take when you outsource your wet work to an honest guy.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller prepares to testify before the House Judiciary Committee during a much-anticipated hearing about Russian interference into the 2016 election and possible efforts by US President Donald Trump to obstruct Mueller’s investigation, in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on July 24, 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE
So, Democrats decided to take matters into their own hands.
In September, they launched a partisan impeachment process, in which lots of people on both sides accused the other side of lying and other bad things. In December, House Democrats impeached Trump.
It all ended last week when the Senate acquitted him. Votes in both the impeachment and trial were partisan, almost entirely along party lines. With nine months to go before elections, the anti-Trump crowd may even try to impeach him again, so the orange-haired “threat to democracy” can’t be re-elected.
Don’t dwell on that, it might give you a headache.
Meanwhile, the other half of the country doesn’t think Trump is the threat to democracy. They think the attempt by the House to remove the president was the threat. And democracy just fought it off.
Audience members hold signs in support of US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan on December 18, 2019. Photo: AP
Millions of Americans, on both sides, do agree on one thing: they are sick of Washington.
It’s hard to think that many who vote for Trump really like him as a person. But they see an economy that’s doing well and they’ve learned to live with his foul mouth and bullying behaviour. They don’t see a fascist in the White House. They see a foul-mouthed bully, who somehow made it to the top and – surprise! – is delivering on many of his promises.
Everybody who works in corporate America knows guys like that.
One irony of the impeachment was that it was done in part to protect Joe Biden, the former vice-president and current presidential candidate. That seems not to have been thought through properly. For months, impeachment kept Ukraine in the news.
This meant that allegations about Biden and his son, Hunter, who was paid a lot of money by a Ukrainian gas company to sit on its board of directors and do nobody-knows-what, also stayed in the news. Biden’s dismal showing in Iowa last week was partly due to this own-goal by the Democrats.
Americans look at Hunter Biden’s deal and see Clintons-Lite – money for nothing. Of course, since nobody with US$500,000 to drop for a Clinton speech or US$50,000 per month for a Biden to warm a board seat is dumb enough to actually pay money for nothing, Americans figure it must be money for something, and they don’t want us to know what that something is.
We’re tired of it. Politicians used to go to jail for that. Now they go to Davos.
American democracy isn’t broken. It’s just being abused in a grotesque parody by shameful politicians. One could even argue that it has been the winner over the past few ugly years. American democracy isn’t just busloads of urban elites and rural farmers, Ivy Leaguers and “deplorables” with fake identity cards showing up in Michigan to vote on election day. It’s all the checks and balances penned into our Constitution 250 years ago by people a lot more thoughtful and grounded than our current so-called leaders. These checks and balances are alive and well and functioning as designed.
If anything is broken, it’s our politicians. That’s the real problem with American democracy today: hysterical, dishonest, hyper-partisan people are in charge of it.
Not to worry though. Sooner or later, democracy will fix them too.
Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors
