The Impeachment Inches Along

The House judiciary committee spent an exhausting 14 hours squabbling about the impeachment of President Donald Trump on Thursday, then went home without having voted on on the matter. A vote is scheduled for this morning, and it’s a safe bet the committee will pass two articles of impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on strict party lines and set up a vote by the full House.

The House Republicans can continue to slow things down with amendments they know won’t be passed, and conspiracy theories that can’t be proved, and non-stop points of order and indignant complaints about the constitutional process, but eventually the overwhelming Democratic majority in the House will vote to impeach Trump. The Democrats’ voters want Trump out of office as soon as possible, all of the evidence so far indicates that Trump is guilty of what they’re charging him with, and only the Republicans are fearful of what Trump might “tweet” about it.

Trump has been “tweeting” even more than usual, setting a presidential record with 105 “tweets” on Sunday and more than 90 during Thursday’s impeachment session. He took time out of his busy day to taunt a 16-year-old climate change activist after she was named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year,” but mostly it’s been diatribes abut hoaxes and witch hunts and diabolically crazed Democrats. He’s not offering any exculpatory evidence, is blocking key witnesses from giving testimony to Congress, and his taunts are increasingly lame and his “tweets” increasingly ignored.

The smart is money is betting that Trump won’t be removed from office by the Senate, where the Republicans have a slight majority and a supermajority is required for a conviction, but he and his party will likely be bruised by the process. According to the Constitution the trial in the Senate will be presided by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and given his reputation for nonpartisanship he’s likely to compel the testimony of those key witnesses Trump has thus far muzzled, and we expect there’s good reason Trump doesn’t want them to testify. The Republicans in the House have been playing to the die-hard Trump supporters, the Republicans in the Senate will mostly do the same, and to everyone who’s paying attention but the die-hards they look ridiculous.

The good news for Republicans is that there are a lot die-hard fans and much of the country isn’t paying attention.

— Bud Norman

Another Day in Post-Racial America

The post-racial America that was promised with the election of President Barack Obama feels as racial as ever. The case of George Zimmerman, currently on trial in Florida on a charge of second-degree murder for killing Trayvon Martin, is an especially glaring example.

By now the facts are widely known. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community that had recently suffered a rash of burglaries and home invasions, shot the unarmed 17-year-old Martin with a licensed handgun during a struggle that followed Zimmerman observing the unfamiliar teenager’s suspicious behavior and calling police to report it. Although Zimmerman has always admitted firing the fatal shot to Martin’s chest, he has contended from the outset that he acted in self-defense after being attacked and while fearing for his life. Eyewitness testimony introduced by the prosecution has described Martin on top of Zimmerman “raining down punches” during a struggle, which is corroborated by injuries found on Zimmerman immediately after the incident, and no evidence or testimony introduced during the trial contradicts the defendant’s story. During a rambling and illogical closing statement the prosecution nonetheless asserted that “Martin did nothing wrong,” and spent the rest of the lengthy oration conceding the legality of Zimmerman’s actions prior to the shooting but making appeals to the jury’s emotions.

The case would have never been brought to trial, as the investigating police officers recommended, if not for the fact that Martin is black and Zimmerman has a white-sounding name and enough white lineage that The New York Times and other news outlets were forced to create the previously unknown racial category of “white Hispanic” to describe him. These facts, which should be entirely irrelevant to the legal disposition of the matter, led to widespread protests and much media hysteria following the original police decision not to bring charges, and it was all based without a shrewd of evidence on the racist assumption that the “white” shooter had killed Martin because of a racial animus and that institutional racism was responsible for his freedom. It was the same sort of racial politics that had been at play in Tawana Brawley’s false charges of rape and kidnapping, the discredited charges of rape against the Duke University lacrosse team, a Mississippi teenager’s suicide that activists insisted was a lynching, and countless other real-life cases as well as the plot of Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

The protestors insisted that Martin was a peaceable lad who had been targeted merely because of his skin color and a “hoodie” sweatshirt that is apparently a uniform of the hip-hop sub-culture, the media usually chose to run pictures of Martin as an angelic-looking 12-year-old, and much emotion was invested in the narrative. NBC News aired a story with a tape of Zimmerman’s call to the police that was edited to make him sound racist, a “Million Hoodie March” drew participants around the country, countless people took to social media outlets to promise riots and the murder of Zimmerman in the case of an acquittal, and the President of the United States weighed in with the comment that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Subsequent revelations that it was all a simplistic lie did little to cool the emotions. Friends of various ethnicities testified to the press about Zimmerman’s cordial and even close relationships with black people, while stories surfaced of Martin’s drug use and penchant for street fights. Sending “tweets” under the handle of “No_Limit_Nigga,” Martin joshed with a cousin about punching a bus driver, and more recent photographs — including one self-portrait of Trayvon defiantly blowing marijuana smoke at the camera — are probably not what the president had in mind he claimed a family resemblance.

None of which is necessarily relevant to the case, either, and a trial is supposed to focus the jury’s and the public’s attention on what is pertinent. Race issues proved inescapable in the media’s coverage, however, with all the predictable guilt-mongering appearing in countless commentaries. A witness who described being on the telephone with Martin until shortly before his death was inconsistent, curt, unable to read a letter she had signed because “I don’t read cursive,” insisted that Martin’s description of Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” was not intended as a racial slur, and was clearly hostile to the court throughout her testimony, and because she was black several pundits propounded that anyone who noticed these things must be a racist. Other writers groused that the prosecution wasn’t emphasizing Zimmerman’s racial motives for the killing, as if he had any evidence to do so. The “tweets” threatening riots and revenge killings continued, although the president has lately been silent. A good story about a racist white man killing a young black choir boy has proved too appealing for mere facts to get in its way.

More frightening, though, is that so many people who will accept the facts as they have been shown in the courtroom and still feel justified in rioting or murder if Zimmerman is acquitted. A sizeable sub-culture of black youth, supported by a multi-billion dollar rap music industry and countless academicians and journalistic grandees, which Martin clearly claimed membership in, believes that any form of disrespect must be punished with severe violence. When Martin correctly perceived that Zimmerman had suspected him of potential misbehavior, the rules of the sub-culture dictate that he administer a beating on the “creepy-ass cracker” and Zimmerman therefore had no right defend himself with lethal force. Race might or might not have played some part in Zimmerman’s suspicions, and it might or might not have been reasonable if it if had, but the rules of the sub-culture insist on a presumption of racist motivation.

The consequences of an American court endorsing such rules would be catastrophic, of course, not matter how much it might satisfy the sub-culture’s sense of retributive justice. A conviction of Zimmerman should worry anyone who feels entitled to defend himself by any means possible if they find themselves in the all-too-possible position of being beneath a strapping young man and having his head slammed against the pavement, even in the all-too-possible case that it’s a strapping young black man, although we don’t worry that the people who feel this way will riot in the case of a conviction.

— Bud Norman

A Trial and a Mystery

There’s no accounting for the apparent lack of interest in the trial of John Edwards.

Monday’s opening arguments received some attention, with the major networks and the last of the big time newspapers duly in attendance, but no broadcast led with the trial and it didn’t dominate the front pages. The coverage was conspicuously low-key, with no mention of it made during the hourly radio news updates, even though the story has all of the necessary elements for a full-blown media frenzy.

It’s a trial, for one thing, and reporters love nothing better than a trial. Trials have an inherently dramatic quality, which is why so many dramatists also love them, and even the dullest reporters can usually wring a fairly riveting lead paragraph out of a day’s testimony. Trials are easy journalistic duty, too, as reporters get to sit in air-conditioned comfort on a special front row seat with everything laid out for them in the simplest language that lawyers can manage. That’s why there have been so many Trials of the Century over the past 100 years or so.

This particular trial also features illicit sex, heart-breaking betrayals, media cover-ups, a prominent public figure exposed as a craven hypocrite, and all the other spicy ingredients found in a typical soap opera. The charges of one count of conspiracy, four counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions and one count of making false statements sound rather dull, but the underlying allegation is that he conspired to accept the contributions in order to keep secret the fact that he had impregnated his mistress while campaigning with a tear-jerking stump speech about how he had stood by his cancer-stricken wife. Far less lurid tales involving zaftig ex-Playboy models, rowdy ice skating queens, and low-level White House staffers who didn’t expose Valerie Plame as a CIA agent have been hyped to a far greater extent by the now quiet news media.

Some will argue that Edwards is just a failed vice-presidential candidate, after all, but we can think of another recent failed vice-presidential candidate who had reporters searching through the garbage cans of Wasilla, Alaska, in search of anything slightly embarrassing, much less something so astoundingly sordid as what Edwards already admits to having done. Besides, had it not been for a couple of hundred voters baffled by the butterfly ballot used in one Florida county back in 2000, America would have been treated to the sorry spectacle of a sitting vice-president forced to admit that he fathered a child out of wedlock while his wife was dying of cancer, something the press would have been hard-pressed to ignore no matter how ardently they might have wished to do so.

Instead of the usual gleeful kicking at the corpse of Edwards’ reputation, though, we get more-in-pity-than-scorn pieces from the likes of The Washington Post, where the reporters lament that the trial is nothing more than “A Final Public Flogging,” and note with sad certainty that Edwards “is now left searching for some strands of redemption, or, at least, forgiveness.” Even the Post isn’t empowered to confer redemption, but they seem quite willing to dole out the forgiveness.

Certain sorts of cynics will suggest that Edwards’ party affiliation has something to do with the strange restraint of the major media, but we can’t be sure. Neither the Washington Post piece nor ABC’s report made any mention of which party Edwards has represented.

— Bud Norman