12 Days

(Even as this was being written, President-elect Biden all but declared, DO NOT DO THIS and in fact it would be beyond stupid for Democrats to poison the incoming president’s administration even before it begins. Don’t attribute wisdom to the House and Senate, there is little there. They are legislators, the lowest form of political animal).

12 Days. Patience, 12 days.    

By now, the day after the Day of Shame (it needs a name and for now this will do), millions of words have been written.

In 100 years, trillions of words will have been written about yesterday’s events. For good or ill, of historical necessity in 100 years historians will have written as much about the Trump administration and its Gotterdammerung as they have written about the Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations and their long-lasting historic and political consequence.

You write about what’s most important whether for good or bad. I have a shelf of books on the Third Reich. I have another on the American Revolution.

This brief writing is not to add to the recriminations, analysis, protestations, chest beating and bewailing. It is written to say breathe U.S.A. Take a deep breath and understand calmly that in 12 days there is a nation that needs government restored — and restored swiftly and competently.

In the immediate moment there are calls for invocation of the 25th Amendment or impeachment, conviction and removal of Trump from the presidency.

With the calendar where it is, both are stupid ideas that should be shut down. I hope you hear that Speaker Pelosi.

First, the 25th Amendment says this concerning who can temporarily remove the president:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide…”

Are executive departments literally only the cabinet departments? Or does the term include others? The CIA is not a department but it is a cabinet level executive agency. Ditto the EPA. Who would sort that out if it ever had to be? The courts. Even in a hurry, courts don’t hurry.

If it means solely the department secretaries and the attorney general, then do acting heads of departments qualify since they have not been confirmed in office by the Senate? There are plenty of those in what’s left of Trump’s rump government. 

In the alternative, Congress has not passed a law clarifying or delegating this hazy authority to anyone else (it probably should be about doing that).

Let’s put aside the 25th for those and other reasons — common sense reasons – the kind of common sense that guides President-elect Biden, who were he an advisor to another president-elect would no doubt council against calling for any such action with but 12 days to Inauguration Day.

Impeachment? There are three historic cases of presidential impeachment that reached the Senate, including the one this term.

That was rushed, but even rushed it took about two months from start to finish. There are 12 days left in Trump’s term and even in the sad and sorry state he has reduced it too there is a government mostly poised to obstruct further madness.

There isn’t time to impeach, and it is the wrong time in the wrong circumstance to create the first 25th Amendment precedent.

If yesterday our country looked like a Banana Republic – and it looked and was a lot worse, having been aided and abetted by more than 130 Republican members of the House and Senate – then ask yourself what Banana Republic legislatures do when mobs break in, disrupt, even overturn governments?

Usually, often, they reconvene, turn around, blame someone and expel him or her from office and immediately move to charge, try and imprison or exile the person they tar with a blame they share.

That is what it will look like, and be like, if from charged emotion and outrage, acting out some pure political theater, there is a concerted real attempt to remove Trump at a minute to midnight at the very end of his woe-begotten term of office.

All the troubles he faces after Jan. 20 have trebled now. That’s his problem. Let’s not make his problems any more of a problem for the United States of America. We have had enough and more than enough of that.

Joe Biden has to start his term with as clean a board as he can have. It is a ruined enough thing now, our country. To engage in Trump-removal at the bitter end will only add bitterness, complicate Biden’s work and turn the start of the Biden administration into an unending focus on the end of the catastrophe that is Trump.

President-elect Biden has a whole lot to do in his first three to six months in office, months that start in only 12 days and must begin with prompt confirmation of his cabinet and top security advisors – and that with as little friction as possible.

He does not need any more congressional stupidity. He does not need to provoke the Republicans, the crazies, lunatic fringe. 

He does not need that even though they deserve the harshest judgement now and when this is all history. 

President-elect Biden does not need it because in 12 days he has to govern. 

We don’t need it because we need him to be able to govern.