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Stephen Gottlieb: Cry The Beloved

ALL our office-holders have sworn to protect and defend our country and our Constitution. Some of us fought and died for it. We’ve argued about the meaning of the Constitution because we cared what it meant for America. We’ve fought over amendments to the Constitution to make it better but also to preserve the strengths of our heritage.

Now we’re struggling over impeachment. When the House considered impeaching Nixon, I feared that impeachment should not be tried unless it would succeed because of the president’s many powers. Impeachment can unleash the worst of America.

We now have witness intimidation. Trump has fired people who were investigating possible wrongdoing. He threatened with jail the man whose investigation of Hillary put Trump in power, because Comey dared investigate Russia too. Trump demands exposure and prosecution of the whistle-blower whose report had already been corroborated. An American ambassador was recalled and told to board the first plane home because of fears that she would be assassinated in circumstances suggesting the threat was from the Administration. No “deep state” compares to him!

This man is dangerous – to critics, to justice and to America itself. That’s why our laws protect the anonymity of whistle-blowers. That’s why Trump can’t stand an anonymous whistle-blower who’s been corroborated. He can’t threaten him or her without identifying who it is. But he can threaten and scare everyone else – the first and indispensable step of dictators. This man is an imposter – he is not an American.

Republicans object that the people should determine Trump’s tenure as if impeachment were unconstitutional, though the Constitution provides for impeachment and the underlying issue is whether we can trust an election while Trump is in office blocking efforts to protect the security of our elections and cuddling up to Russians who want him in power for their, not our, purposes.

Yes, impeachment is about “high crimes and misdemeanors” but cheating the country is also a high crime and misdemeanor. I want to replace Trump with people who have actually spent their lives and careers figuring out who took the American dream out of so many households; people who are trying to put the dream back where it belongs, into the homes of all the good people of America, not into the bloated assets of the people who have the wealth and power to rip every last penny out of our lives and push so many of us onto the tightrope, so accurately described by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, and over the edge into what we now describe as “deaths of despair”. Trump is devoted only to the rich, the only people who can be useful to him. He must have read the Dictator’s Handbook; he’s doing everything the authors identified to retain power. It won’t be part of the trial but that disloyalty to the people is a very high crime.

Alan Paton, a South African, published Cry the Beloved Country in 1948 at the height of the struggle over apartheid. Indeed, cry our beloved country and our beloved Constitution. I pray that Americans will come to appreciate how badly Trump is cheating them and how devoted to them are some of the people who are trying with all their might to get him out of office – before it’s too late.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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