Thursday, July 19, 2018

Three Beautiful Things 07/18/18: Quick Trip to Hayden, Finishing Elizabeth Drew's Book, TV Soon!

1. I hopped in the Sube first thing this morning and bolted to Hayden and dropped off the Sube at the shop to have the air conditioning repaired and Ryan handed me the keys to a car just like ours, only four years older, as a loaner. I dashed from the shop to Pilgrim's Market and slowly examined the beer case and I found a couple of cans of Yeti Imperial Stout and a bomber of Breakside bourbon barrel-aged salted caramel Imperial Stout  for the Deke and I bought a couple of beers, to be revealed later, for Friday's Beer Club at Shawn's.  I returned immediately to Kellogg, eager to get back to reading Elizabeth Drew.

2. Today I finished reading Elizabeth Drew's Washington Journal and the "Afterward" she added in about 2014, forty years after Richard Nixon's resignation.  I kept thinking that it was a slow developing and remarkable, almost unbelievable, achievement that the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 was able to craft and approve Articles of Impeachment and, I kept thinking, it could never happen in 2018. I agree with comments that Elizabeth Drew has made recently that the word "impeachment" or the phrase "impeach Trump" are pressed almost casually, as if it were a move that could be readily accomplished if only gotten underway.

In reality, it's a messy process, vaguely defined in the Constitution. If undertaken, the whole process would have to be invented with the the politically motivated impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton and the somewhat more philosophically worked out articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon serving as precedents. I haven't seen much evidence that the current Congress, and especially the Judiciary Committee, has the ability or the desire to step back from political fighting and enter into a disinterested discussion of Constitutional principles, the concept of impeachment, and how best to draft articles of impeachment in way that would be more similar to a law school seminar than a political battle.

As I was thinking about all of this, the Deke emailed me an article Elizabeth Drew wrote for The New Republic in February, 2018 entitled, "Holding a President Accountable: Why It Might be Impossible intthe Age of Trump".  You can read it, here. The gist of the article is that our Congress is too polarized to undertake serious and thoughtful deliberations upon impeachment. In addition, elected officials are under intense scrutiny by ideological purists, making the discussion and weighing of competing ideas nearly impossible.

As I see it, ideological purity and disinterested philosophical discussion of Constitutional principles cannot co-exist. If one is an ideological purist, all questions, whether about taxes, the right to bear arms, abortion, immigration, or impeachment, are already decided. There's nothing to discuss -- there's only the question of is one with us or against us. Positions on such questions are not regarded as fluid, open to the realities of the moment, open to thoughtful discussion, but as litmus tests.  In general, voters in the USA seem to support this. Voters seem to want to know where candidates stand, seem to want those positions to remain fixed without further examination, and seem to want their elected officials to embody the very ideological purity that keeps our legislative branch from being deliberative.

I'm going to take a break from reading political history. After finishing Washington Journal, I started reading the first of the Dave Robicheaux detective novels by James Lee Burke.

3. The Deke nailed the back onto the shelving we bought last week. Now that this shelving no longer wobbles, it can safely support the (light) weight of our new television and the way is open for me to set up our new tv, blu ray player, and Fire stick. This should be fun.

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