A Line in the Sand
On the importance of impeaching Trump. Again.
Yesterday, Donald Trump was impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives. Impeachment and removal are how we hold Trump accountable for his clearly seditious actions. It draws that ever-important line in the sand. It echoes the point that dangerous, illegal, hate-filled actions demand a response.
I remember my father serving as a lawyer during the Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust was over, and the Nazis had lost. Some wanted to move on to rebuilding. But there needed to be accountability. The Nuremberg trials weren’t about humiliation, grudge-settling, or vengeance. They were about transparently holding accountable the individuals who committed those evil acts and condemning the ideals they represented — the same ideals that were on full display during the January 6th attack on our capitol.
Without the actions of the House and the impending trial in the Senate, what is to prevent this violent, illegal behavior from happening again? As we know from despots, both past and present, half-measures and slaps on the wrist don’t work. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
My parents raised me to do the right thing, but sometimes that’s hard to discern. This is not one of those times.
Impeachment shines a light on the actions that brought us here, and that those actions can’t define us. To mitigate, to make excuses, to delay judgement on behavior that is outrageous serves only to divide us.
We are called on by every ounce of decency in our bodies, our communities, and our country to remove Donald Trump from the roll call of American leaders now and in the future. After years of white supremacist rhetoric, racist policies, and deliberate anti-democractic actions by the President of the United States, the insurrection on January 6th was the inevitable conclusion. Our only choice now is to stop saying, “This isn’t us.” Instead, we must draw a line in the sand and say, “This can’t be us ever again.”
Republicans are talking about impeachment dividing America. But America is already divided. What we now need is to set the foundations for reconciliation following condemnation. And that can only happen if we unequivocally reestablish the norms and laws our diverse country is built on. Impeachment is a judgement, a judgement about what’s acceptable and what’s clearly wrong. It’s a line between acceptable partisanship and inciting a mob to violence, between supporting free and fair elections and denying the will of the people, between supporting your constitutional oath and breaking the law to subvert democracy. There must be a dividing line between right and wrong for our republic to survive.
We have drawn lines many times before between acceptable conduct and unacceptable, inexcusable behavior. Last week’s insurrection is unique in its straightforward attack on American democracy and the American people, but it confronts us with a choice: move on or move forward. To move forward, to have any semblance of unity, and to ensure the foundations of democratic institutions remain strong — we need full, unequivocal accountability.
The line in the sand has been drawn. History will look at where we all stood.
