The Last Measure of Devotion

Seems Mitch McConnell knew if he called back the Senate to begin the Trial that he had no choice but to start down a road towards an historic vote to remove/convict a president.

And he knew there would be no “constitutional escape route.” The issue of Senate jurisdiction would be a mere figment of Rand Paul’s imagination — for how could the Senate that begins a trial of impeachment convince itself — much less the American people — that it simply ran out of time to hold a lawless president who presided over a lawless presidency accountable for death and mayhem.

It would have been a fait accompli for the Kentucky Senator. For if the trial had begun, the only argument for acquittal would have been that somehow Trump didn’t really mean his words or that his words didn’t have their intended effect — but everyone knows they did.

Everyone who has ever been to a movie or watched a newsreel of demagogues in our own history or the world’s knows that Donald Trump is now a member of that cavalcade of outrage — those who having lost the appeal to the reason of citizens or the contest of good will resorts to the demand for the exhibition of frustrated passions and dangerous extremes.

There is, in the final analysis, perhaps no law to apply in these cases — no constitutional process or provision strong enough or durable enough to stop the appeal of a demagogue. In the last scan of History, the only remedy for the danger to our institutions and the demise of a republic is in our hearts. Indeed, that remedy is the last great measure of devotion of which Mr. Lincoln spoke. It is in ourselves.

Now it is history’s turn to write us down as for or against our own destiny; or as Lincoln said to light us down to the latest generation; we shall soon learn whether this last episode of cowardice and its brief flashes of bravery are the harbingers of doom or the groaning of new freedom being born.

-Albert Turner Goins