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ELECTION 2024 - The vital issue at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) will be how Dems handle the effete and disastrous Obama Doctrine which has led the Dems to becoming the Party of Hamas. Presently, the cup has too few tea leaves for a definitive reading. More info may not be available until Thursday evening. Meanwhile, the GOP is wasting its energy fretting over the Dem coup to replace Joe Biden.
The Republic Needs Persons of Integrity to Survive
The founding fathers thought that factions were dangerous as they could gather too much power and turn the country into a tyranny. They would be horrified at the national polarization brought about by the two party system. As Ben Franklin said, the Constitution formed a Republic. They realized that democracies are but a prelude to tyranny of the majority. The founding fathers knew, however, that there had to be some voting because the Declaration of Independence said that any government’s “just powers [derive] from the consent of the governed.” To be crass, the masses are asses; thus, voting was perilous and used as sparingly as possible. The only directly elected part of the government was the House of Representatives, but the terms were limited to two years and each member had to run every two years. Since voters are both myopic and fickle, the quick turn over of the House membership was one way the public could rectify prior mistakes.
The main way to protect the Republic was reliance on the personal integrity of educated men of reason. Thus, we had the electoral college to elect the President, while the Senate was indirectly elected by the state legislatures; Senators’ tenure was six years, with one-third running for re-election every two years. The founding fathers’ faulty reasoning was that men who had already been elected to state legislatures would have more integrity and political sophistication than the public, but it turned out that state legislatures habitually succumbed to corruption. Thus, in 1913 the Constitution was amended to provide for the direct (popular) election of Senators.
The Founders’ Mistaken Faith in Integrity
Going back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, political philosophers adhered to the Doctrine of Esotericism, which held that only a select few men had the intelligence and morality to be trusted with governing. See Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss (and ignore what his alleged disciples at the Claremont Institute say). Because the founding fathers’ legitimate fear of democracies and of voting derived from the Doctrine of Esotericism, they decided that the individuals of suitable education and life experiences (i.e. intelligence and morality) would have sufficient integrity to withstand the vacillating passions of the crowd to perform their constitutional roles. To some extent, men had such integrity, e.g., George Washington’s refusal to serve a third term. He felt that the term of the Presidency had to be limited in order to prevent it from operating like a monarchy. Many Supreme Court judges retired when they recognized that their mental acuity was dipping. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not one such justice, placing her passion for power before the national welfare.
Personal Integrity and Impeachment
Impeachment of a president and his removal from office require Congress and the Senate to have personal integrity to perform their constitutional duties in place of personal ambition or party loyalty. Nixonization was perhaps the best example where integrity prevailed. When Nixon’s guilt was manifest, members of his own party place country before personal benefit. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), House Minority Leader John Rhodes (R-Ariz.), and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) met with Nixon, informing him that the GOP would provide the votes to convict him in the Senate. As Goldwater later wrote, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another, his presidency was finished. None of us doubted the outcome. He would resign." What historians needed not emphasize was that Congress complied a record so that GOP Senators could not in good conscience (integrity) not vote for conviction.
In contrast, in December 2019 liberal and conservative law professors advised Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that her protégé Rep. Adam Schiff’s committee had not complied enough evidence for conviction in the Senate; thus, Pelosi should not pull plug on evidence gathering. The momentum towards placing that damning evidence into the official record was increasing day by day due to witnesses like Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, and David Holmes. Pelosi, however, placed her personal ambition far ahead of her constitutional duty to gather all the evidence, but instead she abruptly halted the proceedings. It was as if during the Watergate hearings, Sen. Sam Ervin had refused to call John Dean so that no one would hear about ”the cancer on the Presidency.” Pelosi’s motivation was that with Trump’s running amuck in the GOP party, the Dems were certain to gain more popular support. See Pelosi Ignores Law Professors As 99% of the public has forgotten, GOP leaders hated Trump and were waiting for enough evidence to be revealed so that a sufficient number of Trump supporters would abandon him, as had happened with Richard Nixon. Pelosi’s toady, Adam Schiff, followed Pelosi’s orders and shut down his committee’s inquiry, guaranteeing that Trump would not be Nixonized.
In Trump’s second impeachment, Pelosi’s motivations had not changed. As the evidence was accumulating so that the GOP leadership would Nixonize Trump, Pelosi made certain that the House impeachment managers never got that evidence. See Unchecked - The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump by Bade and Demirjian. Had insurrectionists like the Proud Boys, however, been allowed to testify, they would have turned against Trump, since Trump was denying that he had prompted their attack on the Capitol and attempted to hang VP Mike Pence. Pelosi knew that unless evidence gathering was stopped ASAP, enough GOP would vote to convict Trump and preclude his running for office again. Hence, again Pelosi betrayed the nation by withholding evidence in order to advance her own power by making certain the GOP could not be rid of Trump.
Although Nixonization is not mentioned in the Constitution, the integrity to protect the nation from a deranged President was one of the founding fathers’ greatest concerns. We now have a national, nay an international crisis, due Nancy Pelosi’s craven lack of integrity to perform her Constitutional duties. Ironically, Pelosi had no qualms about using Nixonization to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. The behind the scenes machinations were virtually identical to the GOP leadership’s visit to Nixon. No one told Nixon or Biden that either had to go; they merely pointed out the impending doomsday scenarios, and later they claimed it was Nixon’s or Biden’s decision.
The political philosophy lesson is that there are times when elected officials need the integrity to take behind the scenes action to protect the Republic. In neither of Trump impeachments nor in removing Biden did Nancy Pelosi operate from integrity, but rather solely to preserve her personal power.
One can almost sympathize with the present GOP consternation over the way Pelosi used her power to remove Biden, whereas she had used her power to force the GOP to keep Trump.
Kamala’s Integrity Dilemma
Since Pelosi and Obama placed Kamala Harris into power, Harris has a choice: Shall she continue with the Dems’ being the Woke Party of Hamas or she will re-direct her campaign towards the Center? The Center has more votes than the Hamas wing of the Dem Party. The ending of this saga is yet to be written. What would Obama do? Replace Harris with Yahya Sinwar?
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected].)
