It’s mass hysteria. Pundits wringing their hands about the national impact. We must be careful. We have to take precautions. There’s real danger. It could mean Armageddon — total societal destruction.
Coronavirus?
No… the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump. Don’t believe me? Look at the people claiming that the future of democracy itself hung in the balance of the Senate impeachment vote.
Against the backdrop of a possible actual global pandemic, impeachment rhetoric is put in its proper, absurd, context. Impeachment fever certainly seems like a symptom of a virus — the societal kind rather than the biological. The frenzy is airborne in the sense that it’s spread by word of mouth. A real social epidemic. More precisely — a social media epidemic.
What’s the solution? Coronavirus has people wearing masks. Health organizations are enforcing quarantines. Scientists are working over-time on a vaccine.
The cure for impeachment-itis might be ear plugs, shutting down wifi, or a healthy dose of using the remote to turn off cable news, but lab tests are so-far inconclusive. Historians, rather than scientists, should play a leading role stopping the epidemic, but the letter sent to Congress in support of impeachment and signed by over 100 left-leaning historians indicates the virus might have gotten loose in the social science lab. Or perhaps in yesterday’s lunch left in the faculty lounge fridge.
The reality is that an acquittal of President Trump by the Senate is proof positive that our democracy is healthy and well. It doesn’t portend end times. Rather, it reinforces the timeless wisdom of the founders.
One explanation for impeachment hysteria is that opponents of the president are suffering from the affliction of applying their personal opinion about the outcome to the entire process. In the courtroom, justice includes the process of indictment by a grand jury; allowing the defendant access to the evidence through discovery, and providing a speedy trial by a jury of the accused’s peers. Too many consider only the outcome — guilty or innocent — and declare justice served or denied based on that.
In President Trump’s case, the result of the Senate vote is no gauge of democratic health. The fact that this President has been subjected to a process: unprecedented investigation, impeachment, and a Senate trial proves that democracy is alive and well. The threshold to remove a duly elected President is appropriately high. A room full of preening politicians, most of whom fancy themselves of presidential timber, ought not to be able to easily remove a chief executive put in place by the American electorate. The founders saw to that.
The panic rises among the afflicted just by referring to the president as duly elected. “But the Electoral College isn’t fair,” comes the cry from the quarantine zone. One Democratic presidential contender even says she plans to dissolve the Electoral College by presidential fiat — just as soon as she’s put into office by the Electoral College. Irony isn’t required to file nomination petitions in the Iowa Caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.
There have even been arguments — and this is peak impeachment-itis; the patients are probably too far gone to be saved — that the Senate vote in the impeachment trial is itself inequitable. They claim that a Wyoming Republican casting a vote against impeachment represents 575,000 Americans, give or take, while a California Democrat voting in favor represents 39.5 million. As if impeachment should also be decided by a national popular vote.
So, insert those ear plugs. Don’t allow the earworm of rhetorical insincerity to infiltrate. Recognize that this process has been by the book — our founding tome. If anything, House Democrats’ obsession with invalidating the president’s election has been more of a threat to the democratic process than the impeachment trial. And their constant efforts (all foiled, by the way) haven’t risen to much of a threat at all.
Don’t look to a medical journal for answers to impeachment-itis — look at the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and 244 years of a precedent to reinforce that we’re doing just fine. With impeachment behind us, we will turn attention to the election. In November voters will have the final say, and to borrow an often-misapplied street chant. THIS is what democracy looks like.
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Matt Dole is a communications consultant based in Columbus, Ohio. @MattDole on Twitter.
