Setting the United States on the Road to Dictatorship
Varna, Bulgaria, February 1st, 2020
Salaroche


The Impeachment sham staged as trial in the Senate over the past few days is finally coming to its anticipated end: Donald Trump will be exonerated of any culpability for abuse of power in his dealings with the president of Ukraine and will be acquitted of obstruction of Congress for openly refusing to provide documents and witnesses to the Impeachment hearings held at the House of Representatives a few weeks ago.

In other words, Donald Trump will be handed carte blanche to repeat those very same two-timing shenanigans as many times as he wishes, thereby promising that the general elections to be held in November may well be anything but clean and fair.

Furthermore, from now on, presidential elections in the United States will always run the risk of not being decided solely by the American people, but increasingly by foreign governments interested in gaining a foothold in the decision-making process of the United States foreign policy, even as such foreign influence may hinge on the foreign governments’ acquiescing to the pressure exerted on them by the President of the United States (help me get reelected, or else…)

But that’s not all. From the moment Donald Trump will be acquitted, any president of the United States will forever be entitled to engage in whatever trickeries may further his designs for reelection, provided only that he claims his deceits are done “in the public interest”.

It doesn’t matter whether those presidential deceptions may go straight against one of the fundamental pillars of American Democracy, the electoral process, if the president claims to think his reelection is in the interest of the people, any dirty trick he might come up with is fair game.

Just picture that, within such a corrupt concept of presidential powers, the burglary committed at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Offices building on June 17, 1972, by “the plumbers” working for Richard Nixon, would have been perfectly acceptable and would not have risen to the level of Impeachment, as long as Nixon had had the shameless courage to claim he had ordered that burglary “in the public interest”.

Along those lines, and in an extreme case, it wouldn’t really matter whether Donald Trump actually shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, as long as he claimed his intentions in doing so were to protect the interests of the people. Forget whether his actions may be criminal or rise to the level of impeachable offenses, if he claimed his intentions were patriotic, that is all that would matter.

That is basically what Alan Dershowitz was arguing before the TV cameras at the Impeachment trial a couple of days ago. To see and hear such deranged pronouncements, please click on the following link:

https://www.politico.com/video/2020/01/29/dershowitz-not-quid-pro-quo-if-president-does-something-that-he-believes-will-help-him-get-elected-in-the-public-interest-069505

“If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” said Dershowitz, thereby giving heavy ammunition to the Republican Senators to vote against calling any witnesses to the trial, which they didn't call.

In Dershowitz’ view, it doesn’t matter at all whether Trump actually engaged in an open Quid Pro Quo transaction with the president of Ukraine, because he did it to further his reelection chances and his reelection would be “in the public interest”, regardless of whether that conclusion is arrived at by the American people in general or only by Dershowitz.

The fact is that Dershowitz banks largely on his long reputation as a Harvard scholar and lawyer to assert the credibility of his “legal” lunacies, knowing that the Republican senators were there only waiting like hungry mongrels for him to give them enough argumentative meat, so that after chewing on it they could regurgitate it in the form of a blank check extended to the corrupt and amoral actual president of the United States.

There is no doubt that Article Two of the constitution gives broad powers to the president, but whether those powers go as far as the Republican senators would have us believe, is another story. Like many legal and constitutional documents, whatever is written in them is usually subject to interpretation, to the point of there being instances in which diverging understandings can be gleaned from a single passage.

Dershowitz' interpretations are just that, the extreme-right personal explications of a highly duplicitous and hypocritical deranged ideologue. Just recall that barely a few days before the Impeachment trial began, he went around the national media claiming he was a libertarian who voted for Hillary Clinton and that his participation as part of Trump’s defense team was not to defend Trump, but to defend the constitution.

As the impeachment trial days went by, however, Dershowitz only ended up providing the determinant argument to acquit Trump, while at the same time smearing the spirit of the constitution with his highly corrupt interpretations, which strike directly at the heart of one of the principles guiding the American Republic, the coequal power vested on each of the three branches of government.

The Unitary Executive Theory proclaimed by Dershowitz would fit better along the lines of an Imperial Presidency as explained by Arthur Schlesinger in the early 70’s, as it extends beyond the concept originally embraced by Alexander Hamilton. In Dershowitz' scheme of things, the president has absolute power over the Executive branch and the Legislative has no power to scrutinize the president’s actions as long as the president claims that all he does is in the interest of the people, while in Hamilton’s view the Senate can hold the president accountable and can remove him from office through the Impeachment process whenever the Senate finds reason enough to do so.

But a president that can justify his impeachable offenses merely by claiming that everything he does is in the interest of the people, thereby exonerating himself of any wrong doing, is basically a president invested with dictatorial powers.

To legally exculpate anyone of any guilt under the argument that they didn’t have any criminal intentions when they committed a crime is to promote such very same crime rather than to prevent it. Similarly, to exonerate in the name of the public interest a president bent on inviting and coercing foreign governments to interfere in the American democratic process, is to knowingly undermine the very foundations of the Democratic Republic of the United States, thereby wounding the public interest rather than protecting and promoting it.

In a few words, what the Republicans will be doing in exonerating Trump is simply setting the United States on the road to dictatorship.

May the Universal Forces protect the Democratic Republic of the United States of America from her foreign and domestic enemies, but mostly from her domestic ones.

Salaroche