All Changed, Changed Utterly

I feel like something is happening. A switch was turned. The lights came on. There are suddenly a lot of finest moments going around. Nancy Pelosi had one. Mitt Romney had one. The Lawfare podcast Rational Security certainly had one. Through forty-five minutes of an usually short, abrupt episode, they were on fire. This was the historical moment a podcast like Rational Security was made for.

Listening to it was when my moment came. I too was transformed. Up until I heard it, I was still thinking about the Trump/Ukraine story as something like a permutation of all the abuses and corruption that had come before. "Just another instance of his complicity in election interference." I was trying to think of how the case might be constructed that this violated campaign finance laws.

Susan Hennessey snapped me out of it. Oh right, I realized, as soon as she pointed it out. Election interference isn't the half of it. What actually just happened is that the president of the United States tried to force a foreign government to undertake a politically-motivated malicious prosecution of an opposition candidate. This leaves campaign finance laws in the dust.

We are in the realm now of basic civil liberties and human rights. We are talking about a violation of the fourth amendment, the fifth amendment, the fourteenth amendment, and god knows what else.

The truth of this can be somewhat obscured but the fact that Joe Biden is a relatively powerful and insulated figure. The same holds true to a lesser extent even for his family. But if the president can lean on foreign actors to violate their rights to due process and equal protection of the laws by digging up evidence of wrongdoing as a quid pro quo for aid, he can do the same to anyone.

Impeaching the president for this action is a moral imperative beyond any possible political calculation. Our democracy in every sense depends on it. If the president is permitted to use the power of his office -- and the enormous carrot of congressionally-appropriated funds-- to compel politically-motivated prosecutions of anyone he dislikes, anywhere in the world, we are all lost.

There is no protection for anyone under the rights of the constitution in that case. No conceivable critic of the president is safe. No opposition figure could be spared. We are tipped over in one go into the realm of outright authoritarianism.

For the very reason that the stakes of failing to act are so dire, however, I feel a shift may already be happening. People are catching on. Pelosi is changed. Romney is changed. The CIA emerged - after half a century of abusing civil liberties and human rights - as for once the implausible champions of American democracy.

Maybe even goddamn Mitch McConnell will have his unexpected moment -- as the capstone of an otherwise ignominious career-- of finally putting country and constitution ahead of party.

It seems unlikely, but who knows? Something turned this week, I tell you. Hence all the finest moments that are suddenly going around. I echo Yeats, who faintly echoed Paul in turn. Pelosi and Romney. McConnell and Collins.

All changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.