“Folks, this is reporter Danforth Twiggler, and we’re here three months in the future, January 4th of 2020. As you all know, former President Trump was just convicted in his impeachment trial, and we’ve been fortunate to snag an interview with Republican Senator Clutching F. Power of >crackle-fade-out<!”
“Senator, thank you for speaking with us. Senator Power, what factor, in the trial that ended yesterday in the conviction of President Trump, made you decide to vote against him?”
“Thank you for having me, Dan. Dan, for me, it began with the corruption evidenced in his ‘Ukraine call’, his crass use of the Oval Office to enrich himself, and ended with the evidence of his obeying the orders from the Russian state. He may have claimed that Russia was our friend, but we knew better!”
“So Representative Pelosi and her team were effective in their prosecutorial role?”
“>cough< I felt the evidence spoke for itself.”
“Thank you, sir. So the revelations of his payoffs to his paramours to keep them quiet during the campaign didn’t bother you?”
“Well, Dan, naturally, as a proud Evangelist, I was of course disgusted by his behavior, but he was doing God’s work with the judiciary -”
“You then agree with Pastor Jeffress, Ralph Reed, and others that Trump should have been given a free pass since he was touched by God?”
“Well, no, he was done with his work -”
“And God just throws away his tools when he’s done with him? Very interesting. I would not care to work for God. But going back to his attempts to buy the silence of his paramours, we knew about these virtually by the time he was taking office, and yet you didn’t comment on this criminal behavior -”
“I, I didn’t believe it was all that important -”
“Then there was the ten reports of obstruction in the Mueller Report -”
“What obstruction? I, I never read the damn, errrr, darn thing anyway!”
“And why not, Senator Power?”
“God would never permit his chosen tool to, to, and that report was therefore blasphemy!”
“And, yet, here we are. Senator, the President, excuse me, former President is widely seen as having displayed evidence of his miscreancy early in his tenure. I speak, of course, of such incidents as his unrecorded interviews with President Putin, his revelations of highly classified materials in public, and his infelicities in the selection of his Cabinet secretaries, and, oh, just his general incompetency. Given all this, if he had been impeached and convicted much earlier in his tenure, isn’t it true that the United States would have had a much more quiet and productive period?”
“Not at all, the judiciary -”
“Even with Vice President -”
“THE JUDGES! For they will wield the sword to redeem us -”
“So, Senator, you admit that you put your own self-interest ahead of the Nation’s -”
“They’re the same!”
“Thank you, Senator, for explaining your Party’s reluctance to to remove the worst President in modern memory. Tell me, sir, is it true that you were fired from your last three jobs for gross incompetency before you became a cleric and started a megachurch in – ah, he just stalked away, folks, I suppose discussing competency is just over the line. This is …”
With apologies to the late Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and I suspect the reporter was from the Center for Inquiry, a freethinker organization that spends a lot of time safeguarding the secular nature of our government, when it can.
My point, of course, is that most of the Republicans in Congress have wedded themselves to Trump, and to vote for impeachment or conviction would, in effect, be a vote to do the same to themselves and their badly broken ideology or religious convictions.
So, despite the happy words of some pundits, I don’t see it happening.
