Trump impeachment trial: Is US politics beyond the point of repair?

The hyperpartisanship of Republicans and Democrats has been evident in the party-line votes to impeach and acquit. The coarseness and ugliness of political discourse we have heard every day, which prompted the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts to tell both sides to dial back the rhetoric.

Again we have witnessed the negative statecraft of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who used parliamentary procedures to bar witnesses from even appearing in the trial – a case, historians may well conclude, of jurors actively obstructing justice. McConnell managed to block Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year. In preventing the Democratic House managers from calling witnesses, such as the former National Security Advisor John Bolton who could have completely blown up the president’s defence, he hardly broke sweat.

Trump’s victory rally in the East Room of the White House the morning after his acquittal, where Republican jurors stood to applaud, may well come to be seen as a definitive moment – when the party of Reagan truly became the party of Trump. Senators from the Grand Old Party, the GOP, have now clicked on the terms and conditions of the Trump presidency after examining for three years the fine print. They have fallen into line. Many have become his spear-carriers. Striking, too, was how the Attorney General, William Barr, got up from his seat at the event to clap and salute Trump’s legal team, suggesting the wall that should exist between prosecutors at the Justice Department and political operatives at the White House has been flattened.

For me, though, the moment that encapsulated the era came when Trump awarded the presidential medal of freedom to the conservative radio host, Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing talk show host is a high priest of polarisation. Few conservatives have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump. With that primetime ceremonial, the president revealed the chronic state of America’s disunion.

A broken politics, a broken democracy, a broken country.

Is the United States beyond the point of repair?

 

 

Navy Vet

Article URL : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51417722