Pierce: The Hour of the Founders Arrived Again on Friday Morning in the House Judiciary Committee
Note: Charlie Pierce was not by a car last week in Boston. He notes on Twitter that he is recovering.
The Hour of the Founders Arrived Again on Friday Morning in the House Judiciary Committee
It was a moment for the better angels of our politics, before the process heads to Mitch McConnell's Senate.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
DEC 13, 2019
....This president* brought the taste for carrion common to modern vulture capitalism into our politics. He brought the rabid wolverine ethos of Manhattan real estate into our government. This was to nobody’s surprise. Corruption is all there is to the man. It’s what gives him life. It is his animating spirit. It’s the dark North Star by which he’s always navigated through a world he’d been taught was every bit as corrupt as he is.
Look at the faces who brought down the Hour of the Founders—all Democrats, because that’s the way of things these days. Val Demings, a former cop from Florida, who always looks as though she’s ready to cuff a dude and take him downtown. Lucy McBath of Georgia, who seven years ago was a flight attendant raising a young son, until that son was murdered in his car for the dual crimes of being black and playing music loudly. This brought Lucy McBath to activism and, ultimately, to the Congress and a seat on the House Judiciary Committee. That's where she got to pass the kind of formal, dignified justice on a president* whose approach to the Constitution he swore to uphold is roughly the same as the attitude toward hip-hop music held by her son’s murderer. In a very real and modern sense, Lucy McBath is a Founder now.
Watching from afar, due to the unfortunate intercession of automobile into my affairs, I decided that the people who would speak for me in this matter would be people like Lucy McBath, a true citizen-legislator who shaped her personal tragedy into a nobility that shames even many of the marble statues that litter her very strange new workplace. The process now moves to the Senate, where, barring a celestial visitation to the home of Mitch McConnell, it will come to a conclusion as pre-ordained as any professional wrestling match. But Friday was a moment on its own, and it belonged to better people and a cleaner politics. It was a reminder from our national conscience of the wisdom of that most uncivil of our Founders, Thomas Paine, who never held a political office, but who believed more deeply than almost any of them in the animating revolutionary spirit, and who navigated most closely by the true North Star that was born in Philadelphia when the hour of the Founders came around for the first time.
“There is something in corruption,” Paine wrote, “which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon and sees everything as stained and impure.”
That is the way the current president* was raised to look at the world, and it’s why he never should have been president*, and shouldn’t be any more. How clear will be the eye with which we see ourselves?
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30222223/house-judiciary-committee-approves-articles-of-impeachment-trump/
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