In their opposition to the impeachment of Trump, more than one House Republican cited this excerpt form Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural address:

“”With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

What they forgot is that Lincoln understood that the prerequisite for that moral invocation was the decisive military defeat of the insurrectionists in the South. And General Sherman with Lincoln’s full support at that same moment was doing exactly that as he and his army marched through the Deep South laying waste to the Confederate Army and Confederacy.

The quisling Republicans, dripping in white supremacy and political extremism, are either outright lying or engaging in the worst forms of false equivalency to make their case against impeachment.

It is said that proceeding ahead with impeachment will invite bitterness and blowback from Trump’s base. That is likely true. But it is also true that to do nothing in the face of this brazen, fascist like, white supremacist assault on our elections and government will almost surely encourage similar, likely better coordinated, fascistic assaults on our government and people in the future.

LOCK THEM UP

Trump and the Republican Party have suffered a major setback. Both are on the defensive and running for cover. On the other hand, the Democrats are in a notably stronger position politically and morally. None of us imagined on election day this turn of events. With control of the Presidency and Congress, the Biden administration can and should move an ambitious agenda. Or, to put if differently, an agenda that meets the present moment of intersecting crises, including the crisis of democracy, while moving swiftly to punish the coup organizers and foot soldiers.