Impeach

In a few hours, I'll be heading to one of the many pro-impeachment protests scheduled for this evening, December 17. They've been pending, timed to happen the night before the full House finally votes on the articles of impeachment. Yet another day (or night) standing outside in the Minnesota winter to say: I do not consent.

I was 12 years old when Republicans who wanted to reelect the president broke into the DNC's Watergate headquarters and 14 when Nixon finally resigned. I watched a lot of the hearings on TV, both in the House and the Senate, with my dying grandfather. He managed to hang on until just a few weeks after Nixon flew off to California in that helicopter.

It has been completely obvious to me for a long time that Mafia Mulligan's actions, in many ways, are one or two orders of magnitude worse than what Nixon did. (The graft of his family and collusion with the Saudis on Khashoggi's murder come to mind, without even getting into the 2016 election or the Ukrainian extortion.) It's hard to believe anyone would deny it, so it has been painful to listen to Republican members of Congress defending him and casting aspersions upon their Democratic colleagues.

But I guess there were three members of Congress who voted against admitting the final report on Nixon's wrongdoing into the Congressional record back in 1974 as well. (My new knowledge on this comes from Rachel Maddow.) One of the three was a Dixiecrat named G.V. Montgomery who (as a National Guard colonel) personally led the arrest of John Lewis and other freedom riders in Mississippi in 1961. The second one was also a Dixiecrat.

The third was named Earl Landgrebe, a Republican from Indiana, who explained his vote this way:

Don't confuse me with the facts. I've got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment. I'm going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of the building and shot.

The difference between 1974 and today is that now it's the entire Republican delegation who thinks like Landgrebe. Historian Heather Cox Richardson had a post worth reading on why that may be.

By coincidence, during my recent early-life consolidation down in the basement, I came across a couple of cartoons that are relevant. They were in a notebook from a history class I took my freshman year of college, 1977. All the other papers in the notebook were either mimeos or dittos, but these are Xerox photocopies:




(It took me a little while to realize the tailor is H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff.)

The "emperor's new clothes" story is one of the cultural tropes that used to seem like it fit the Mulligan era really well, but at this point we've gone so far beyond it. In our reality, many of the people in the crowd are parading around naked, too, and they're belittling the people who are wearing clothes.