Well, that ended pretty much exactly the way everyone except Senator Romney expected it to. And he was only half surprised.
I actually have several other things I want to write about.
Right now, I even have 7 posts already written. Sometimes I get busy, so I’m trying to maintain a buffer so I don’t have to find time to write a new one every day.
Some of them are even about important issues, that are most usefully discussed while they’re current news.
(Hi, PG&E and your hopefully-impending conversion into a public utility district; your time will come! But not today.)
No, I need to close out the impeachment today instead.
The Senate has voted: the U.S. is a de facto monarchy.
I’ve commented on this process several times.
The only legal process by which the United States could have pulled back and said that the sitting President is subject to the law has now completed with the result that no, in fact there are no laws the President will be held subject to.
That’s not … optimal.
There are two problems that need solving here.
There are two reasonable interpretations of why the Senate vote went the way it did: either this is the result of simple Party loyalty or the boosters of stronger Executive power have won.
(Well, the boosters of stronger Executive power have won either way; the question is whether they won because Senators agreed with them or if they won because more Senators were the same Party as the current President.)
Partisanship is a poor explanation on its own, for the simple reason that Pence is right there and would take over if the Senate had removed Trump. He is, after all, a member of the same Party.
If it were a non-partisan pro-Executive result, then Feinstein would have voted for it and Romney wouldn’t have voted half-against it.
So let’s try to solve both problems.
The Executive needs effective and unavoidable oversight; I’ve discussed a solution to this before: split the Executive into two parts, with one side tasked with oversight of the other and headed by the second-place finisher from the Presidential election.
And we need to weaken the power of any Party to prevent oversight of its members; I’ve discussed a solution to this as well: expand the number of viable Parties by changing from single-representative districts to multiple-representative districts with proportional representation.
Either of these solution would have prevented this.
But both of them together can stop it happening again.
And they’re the right thing to do anyway.
