There are constitutional provisions that protect a president against insurrection but what measures are available when the president is the insurrectionist?
One remedy is impeachment, which has been initiated by the House, but we would prefer imprisonment, though the likelihood of either is pretty remote.
Among the charges proposed in the House impeachment are high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump’s call for the overturning of election results in Georgia and pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and his false claims of fraud that provoked his supporters, fueling their outrage and attack on Capitol Hill.
Back in 1967, civil rights activist and militant H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) was charged with inciting a riot in the Cambridge, Maryland uprising after he delivered a speech there. Of course, there is a world of difference between what happens to a Black person charged with a crime and a white man, though fortunately Brown was exonerated.
There is also a vast chasm of difference when a white mob assembles and carries out mayhem and destruction as it did recently on Capitol Hill as opposed to a peaceful protest with African Americans among the major demonstrators.
None of this comes as a surprise, but it is no less alarming and disappointing when democracy is once more subsumed by intolerance.
Several Republicans are bellyaching that the impeachment will only exacerbate the nation’s divide, which is already wider than the Grand Canyon. There is a terrible and seemingly irreconcilable schism in our country and the fault line is systemic.
Our hope is that the incoming administration will not only deal with the damage done by Trump’s insanity but undergoes repair and restores some of the changes delivered by President Obama, and even extends them.
And while we’re wishing let’s hope that come next Wednesday we can have a quieter transition and inauguration, one that would be a welcomed step back to a relative normalcy in a time when so much turmoil and death ravage our possibilities.
Yes, impeach Trump but convict and imprison him too, and put a permanent stain on his reign.