A mob of Trump supporters surround the gallows on which they intended to hang Vice President Mike Pence at the Capitol, January 6, 2021. Click to enlarge.
Many fine speeches were made on the floor of the House today; here are two that your Head Trucker thinks particularly well done, covering all the essential points of the case.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi gives the opening argument:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives the closing argument:
Update, 3:36 p.m., Texas time--The House of Representatives has just voted to impeach Trump, 232-197. Ten Republicans voted with the Democrats to impeach. Four Republicans did not vote. House has now adjourned until January 15th. The Senate is in recess until January 19th, when the Article of Impeachment will be presented to them.
For the benefit of my overseas truckbuddies, it is important to understand that impeachment is not the same as removal from office. Rather, an impeachment by the House is equivalent to an indictment by a grand jury; the Senate then acts as a court to try the case, and either convict (by a two-thirds majority) or acquit the President, who would cease to be President immediately upon conviction. Trump was previously impeached by the House in December 2019, but acquitted by the Senate in February 2020.
The Constitution gives each house of Congress the authority to set its own rules of procedure; thus, the Senate does not have to follow the ordinary rules of procedure used in federal courts. Furthermore, it is up to Congress on its own authority to determine what constitutes the "high crimes and misdemeanors" (not defined in the Constitution) for which a president can be impeached.
Even if the Senate convicted Trump of the charge specified in the Article of Impeachment, the only effect would be to remove him from office - and that will be moot, as Biden will already be President by the time the Senate decides the case. For Trump to be barred from running for office again, or to lose his post-presidency benefits, the Senate would have to vote specifically on those points.
Full text of the Article of Impeachment below the jump - or see PDF in original format here.
For the record, here are some statements on CNN yesterday that lay bare the motives and delusions of Trump's fanatical followers. Of course, everything these commentators say about Trump and his worshippers has always been apparent to all undeceived, clear-eyed Americans, ordinary citizens and honest politicians alike, from the day Trump announced he would run for president in 2015. We have feared what happened last week from the outset - and for good reason, as these commentators explain.
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, shared in frank terms his very moving coming-out story in a speech at the LGBTQ Victory Fund in Washington, D.C., last Sunday, a story that your Head Trucker can relate to:
Your Head Trucker has not quite given up hope that the American ship of state will right itself instead of capsizing under the howling, shifting gales of fanaticism coming from both right and left; but he is very nearly there. The oh-so-pure, oh-so-righteous snowflake generation of young Democrats now coming to power in the party (the mirror image of their Trumpista equivalents in Bizarro world) makes me feel rather seasick, to tell you the truth.
It is, however, heartening to see an openly gay politician throwing his hat into the presidential ring for the first time ever in our history. But is he gay enough? And if not, just who is? Is it RuPaul or nothing? What bar must we clear now to be really and truly gay?
And will the new Kweer Kommissariat take away my pink card?
Frank Bruni has something to say about these matters in his New York Times column this week. Excerpt:
It’s nonnegotiable that Democrats hold their presidential aspirants to high standards on issues of racial justice, gender equality and more. It’s crucial that the party nominate someone who can credibly represent its proudly diverse ranks. But it’s also important that the party not demand a degree of purity that nobody attains.
I’m not recommending the Republicans’ course in accepting and protecting Donald Trump, which was to bury principles so deep that they may never be exhumed. I’m saying that to turn the Democratic primary into a nonstop apology tour when the nominee will be going up against a president never expected to apologize for anything is a risky strategy. It obsesses over the flaws in candidates who have many strengths, defining them in terms of what they seek forgiveness for. It blurs the line between job interview and inquisition. Taken too far, it rips contenders to shreds before Trump even takes out his scissors.
As for the mini-debate about Buttigieg’s gayness, it arose principally from this column in Slate, which included the following paragraph:
“A marginalized sexual orientation can remain unspoken and unnoticed for as long as a queer person desires. A gay man who conforms to a critical mass of gendered expectations can move through life without his sexuality attending every interaction, even after he comes out. Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t activate the ‘Hey, that’s that homosexual gentleman’ response in the average brain. That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough — there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.”
The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.
Also, I guarantee you that Buttigieg’s adherence to “a critical mass of gendered expectations” and failure to “activate” the homosexual-alert siren don’t mean that being gay has been incidental to his life and is incidental to his perspective. That he didn’t come out until he was 33 is all the proof you need that he wrestled privately with his sexual orientation and with fears about how the world would respond to it and to him.
I like what little I have seen of Pete Buttigieg so far - his Oxford degree and Navy service are big plusses in my book. But I think he needs some experience in national politics before trying out for President; he's a big fish in a little pond right now, but that's just a starting point for any candidate.
And I will say this about good old Joe Biden - a great guy with a big heart and a fine political record, but simply too old. If by some twist of fate he did win the 2020 election, he would be 78 on election day, which would be worrisome for several very good reasons that should be obvious to anyone.
I thought it very curious during the election campaign of 2016 that both of the major contenders - and a couple of minor ones - were right at 70 years old. Why was that?
Why is there no Democratic figure of statesmanlike character between the ages of 40 and 70? I ask you.
Last week, Alisyn Camerota of CNN's morning program New Day talked with a group of clean-cut, all-American Trump voters at the Connecticut statehouse. This ties directly into my post last Tuesday, attempting to answer Frank's questions about "where did these people come from" - well, here is a nest of them in Frank's native state, and they are just what I said they were in my post: neither gruesome monsters nor raving lunatics, but ordinary, everyday Americans who are tragically, dangerously misguided and misinformed - and determined to stay that way.
More than that -- I want all you Yankee boys out there to listen closely to their remarks and remember these two vids next time you are tempted to bad-mouth all us Southerners as dumb, stupid rednecks.
Ignorance and blind faith, of course, have no fixed address, and are spread throughout North, South, East, and West, and all up and down the social scale.
This willfully blind faith in a political messiah is the exact equivalent of fanatical religious faith, it seems to me. But it gets even worse when the two are melded: according to this utterly insipid guest on the Jim Bakker Show last week, Trump really, truly is "God's chosen one" and God Himself is going to curse you and your children if you don't support Trump -- no wonder so many "liberal" people hate the very name of Christianity now:
Problem is, as you fellas know if you've ever tried to talk with a Bible-thumper on your doorstep, it's nearly impossible to get someone to see what they don't want to see. The same principle applies to political fanaticism as to the religious kind. People most often believe what they need to believe - reason and logic have nothing to do with it. That's why the nation is so polarized now, and I don't know how or when that will change.
Mike Ashmore of Hooks, Texas, a Marine Corps veteran, waves a Confederate flag in front of the White House during an anti-Obama demonstration on Sunday, October 13, 2013. As a native Southerner, your Head Trucker understands the gesture, but pities the poor boy for not having figured out yet what is so very wrong about what he's doing.
Well, all the world is heaving a sigh of relief as it appears that the shutdown/debt limit crisis is nearing an end tonight. But don't think the war is over. It's merely this coup attempt that has failed; others will follow. It's no good thinking that in twenty years, when all the grumpy, white-haired old Uncle Joes and Aunt Marthas have died off that sweetness and light and sanity will return to American politics - because there are plenty of young'uns coming right along behind them, with a gleam in the eye and a fire in the belly, to carry on the fight to defeat the Great Satan - America.
Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.
When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.
Many of us found in Barack Obama a very post-ideological president, a pragmatist, a Christian, and a traditional family man, and naively believed that he could both repair the enormous damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration and simultaneously reach out to the red states as well. I refuse to say the failure is his. Because he tried. For years, he was lambasted by the left for being far too accommodating, far too reasonable, aloof, not scrappy enough, weak … you know the drill by now. In fact, he was just trying to bring as much of the country along as he could in tackling the huge recession and massive debt he inherited at one and the same time, and in unwinding the 9/11 emergency, and in ending two wars and the morally and legally crippling legacy of torture (about which the GOP is simply in rigid denial).
Obama got zero votes from House Republicans for a desperately needed stimulus in his first weeks in office. So I cannot believe he could have maintained any sort of detente with the Republican right, dominated by the legacy of Palin, rather than McCain. But the healthcare reform clearly ended any sort of possibility of coexistence – and the cold civil war took off again. The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.
But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.
That desperate need for certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.
This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.
Columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune on the meaning of the Confederate flag today:
Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary writes in the Washington Post:
Our politics is a cosmic war, a theologically fueled conflict where our politics itself is seen as the battleground between good and evil. That is the larger frame that can contain both a confederate flag and Islamophobia. At a related demonstration in Washington, D.C. yesterday, Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman said, “I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Koran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”
Klayman carefully added terms such as “nonviolent” and “figuratively” and yet declared our politics as war. The subtext, conveyed in language such as “come out with his hands up,” for example, is very aggressive. If we do not understand that the political and religious right-wing sees American politics as a cosmic war, we might think that there will be a political resolution achieved when the government shutdown is ended, and the debt ceiling raised.
Don’t relax. This has just been a skirmish. The war continues. It will, I believe, even accelerate. Yes, there will be a political “deal” to most likely get a continuing resolution on the budget until early 2014 and raise the debt ceiling, but the war will go on. There will very likely be another government shutdown in early 2014 and another threatened default on our debt. This will occur not for any policy reasons, but because the Tea Party caucus is fighting Satan; they are engaged in a cosmic war with evil in American politics.
The theology of the shutdown is “Christian dominionism” as Morgan Guyton has so well demonstrated. Christian dominionism is the idea that the nation should be governed by Christians according to a conservative understanding of biblical law.
As Guyton showed in his article, Senator Ted Cruz, an architect of the government shutdown, has theological roots in Christian dominionism through the work of his father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor with a Texas charismatic ministry. At an Iowa Family Leadership Summit this summer, the elder Cruz preached, “When you hear this attack on religion, it’s not really an attack on religion. The fundamental basis is this. Socialism requires that government becomes your God.” This explains “homosexual marriage” as it is designed to destroy your “loyalty to the family.” What has to happen is that “kings” will fight “war” to gain “spoils” and establish dominion over the country. . . .
Government shutdowns, threatened debt default, racism, homophobia and Islamophobia can seem like discrete political struggles for democracy, good governance, and equal rights. Progressives and moderates make a huge mistake when they do not see the connections extremists make among them. It is crucial to see that to the extreme right-wing that is hijacking our political process right now, these are not discrete issues but part of a cosmic war on Satan played out in our American political life.
It is my belief that theological struggles need to be engaged as theological struggles and not allowed to mask themselves as ‘politics by other means.’ We are in a struggle not only for the future of our democracy, but also for a Christianity centered on the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth who taught us to pray for “daily bread” on “earth,” not just in heaven, not on some imagined cosmic war fought for political gain.
That will not be over this week. In fact, it is just beginning again.
Oh and one more thing - don't any of you Yankee boys go a-pointing fingers with dirty hands attached. Here's the New Yorker's map of where the Republican "suicide caucus" lives - the red dots indicates districts of those 80 representatives who signed an August letter to John Boehner demanding that he defund Obamacare or shut down the government - and half of them are outside of the South:
Click to enlarge.
Which only goes to show that prejudice, ignorance, hatred, and fanaticism know no boundaries.
Update, 10:20 p.m.:The shutdown is over. Until January. The temporary budget and debt ceiling bill passed the Senate 81-18, and the House by 285-144, including 85 Republicans voting for passage and 198 Democrats. No Democrats voted against the bill, but two Dems abstained - I wonder who they were.
And as a coda to this bizarre episode, while the vote was being tabulated tonight, a House stenographer grabbed the microphone in front of the Speaker's chair and began ranting something about people mocking God and praise Jesus!
When you're gathered around the Thanksgiving table today, don't tell Aunt Martha . . . but that nice juicy Butterball turkey that she spent hours roasting to a golden brown is a secret Muslim. Rightwing nutjob and asshole king Bryan Fischer shouts out the warning to all freedom-loving Americans about the weird top-secret Muslim recipe that has put a hoodoo on all our plump and tender American turkeys:
And I'm like, WTF? How is halal any different from kosher? And why should I care? It only makes a difference to people whose religion has dietary requirements, which mine doesn't. Of course, by dinnertime today, half of America will be torn between throwing up that succulent turkey meat, while the other half will be laughing their butts off at the total redneck assininity of this non-crisis.
Actually, go ahead and tell Aunt Martha and all the rest of your damn family, stir some shit up. It'll be fun.
Just watch what happens when cousin Billy Bob tries to throw Aunt Martha's labor of love into the garbage can. At least when the fight breaks out, you won't get stuck having to watch some stupid-ass football game all afternoon. Grin.
9/11 was a call, in my mind, to defend the Enlightenment from the nihilistic forces of murderous theocratic fanaticism. What it demanded was a rediscovery of secularism and freedom in a war against the forces of Islamism and despotism. I still believe that those who instinctively responded to the attacks by blaming America were morally lost. But I equally believe that those who showed they were willing to throw away America’s values in fighting Jihadism were wrong as well. And those who use religious extremism as a tool to get elected in America are pale reflections of the evil of Islamism - not the equivalent, as I have always insisted, but related. Christianism and Islamism are twin pincers against our freedom and against freely chosen, freely witnessed Christian and Muslim faith. Islamism is far more dangerous. But Islamism will never defeat America’s core values. Christianism has already made a dent.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
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