Elegy for America

The failure of a democracy is signaled when officials blatantly flout its laws and rules.  Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and self-appointed chief boot-licker Lindsey Graham performed the last rites for the United States when they announced in public that they have no intention of acting with impartiality at any impeachment trial of Donald Trump.  By Constitutional law, they are required to do so and to take an oath attesting that they will.  If they do take the oath, everyone knows at this point that they will disregard it as a meaningless ritual that they will ignore.  They've told us that they will.  And so the revered Constitution has been ground under the heels of a couple of vandals.

The Constitution, if anyone is foolish enough to take it seriously at this point, gives the Senate the sole power to act as the jury in an impeachment and it requires the senators to  promise their impartiality:

Section 3. 6: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

The oath or affirmation they are to take is written into the Senate rules:

I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be,) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of_____ ______ , now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God.

The announcement of the death of our democracy is not in their vows to make a travesty of the Constitution; it is in the comparative silence with which their belligerent pledges to do so have been met.  Although a few people have protested their Constitutional blasphemy and said they should recuse themselves, no official action had been taken in response to their avowed intentions.

If government officials disregard the law, why shouldn't everybody?  The leaders have pronounced it irrelevant.

There seems to be no rules or precedents to follow when government officials vow to disobey the law.  However, the U.S. Code lists a threat to break the law in ways that conspire to do damage to the United States as a punishable offense.  But there seems to be no legal process when legislators make such threats.  At minimum, such threats would seem to disqualify them  from conducting any further business as officials.

Graham:“I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here. What I see coming, happening today is just a partisan nonsense.” McConnell:  "Let's quit the charade."

At this point, it would seem time to say, "America, rest in peace." McConnell and Graham have pronounced its death sentence.  But it would betray an aspiration for a democracy that actually works to submit quietly to their defilement of the Constitution and what America has promised in its better times.