by William Skink

The McResisters who have empowered Trump and destroyed mainstream media credibility with Russiagate are not going to stop. No collusion? No problem, they are just shifting to obstruction now.  

One of the best Montana examples of this delusional desire to pursue impeachment and ensure Trump wins reelection is McResister Josh Manning. His latest screed that we “must complete our Constitutional duties” exemplifies the partisan insanity that has gripped the McResistance.

First, I think it’s cute Manning is referencing the Constitution. We’ve been in a Constitutional crisis since 2001, when Congress decided to defer Constitutional authority to wage war to the Executive Office. Where was Manning’s sense of Constitutional duty back then? Things got worse under Obama when he assumed the power to become judge, jury and executioner, ordering a US citizen to be killed with a drone strike (and later, his teenage son). Where was Manning’s sense of outrage against the President for flagrantly violating a US citizen’s Constitutional right to due process?

Maybe Manning was too busy back then taking orders in a war started by fake news?

Now that Russiagate has crashed and burned without Trump overreacting the way it was hoped he would, the McResistance is still clinging to the delusion that they can persuade enough of the public that Trump really is some dangerous Manchurian aberration installed by the Kremlin instead of what I think he is, which is the culmination of a deep corruption that’s been rotting all our institutions for decades.

Here is Manning doing his best to rally the troops:

On April 18, 2019, the US Department of Justice released a heavily redacted version of the long-anticipated “Mueller Report.” The two volume, 448-page report provides a decent overview of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s outreach to Russian interests then its subsequent attempts to cover-up those links as the DOJ began its investigation. Trump apologists and GOP operatives are quick to note Mueller did not find any evidence to bring charges of conspiracy or obstruction of justice. But, as Mueller notes, the report does not “exonerate” the President and Mueller and his team were wary to make conclusive charges because the power of the presidency has become so expanded that Congress has better latitude to make these legal decisions.

So we now exist, yet again, at an impasse in American history like Franklin tried to push us past. Some–like me–are calling for immediate impeachment proceedings against the president, others want to have continued public Congressional hearings (okay, fine), and others say let’s move beyond Trump and concentrate on the 2020 election cycle (this assumes we have a functioning democracy in November 2020). In trying to square all of that, my struggle the past few days has been with how I, we, as Montanans can add to this national conversation.
…
We can debate and argue about what the best political path or strategy is. After she read the complete Mueller Report, Senator Elizabeth Warren said people need to put aside their divisions and “do their constitutional duty.” When I finished both volumes on Friday, reading it through the lens of having watched Russia topple Western democracies, I took a long breath and had the same reaction as Senator Warren. We do not have much time before the cement of Trump’s and Putin’s foundation sets in and we move further and further from Constitutional norms. Let me put it in “Gray’s Anatomy” terms: we know why patient is sick and dying so we do not need to run more tests–we need to operate.

We need to operate? Like, what, a surgical strike? Is that the kind of Constitutional duty Manning is calling for to protect the Constitution from enemies, both foreign and domestic?

The reality is we live in a surveillance state where our Constitutional rights–like the right of citizens “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”–is violated on a daily basis. And how about the Constitutional right to have a free press? Is the McResistance going to raise a critical voice regarding the persecution of Assange as the Trump regime attempts to enact revenge for Assange’s role (along with the New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian) in exposing the crimes and corruption of America’s war machine?

It’s fine and dandy for Democrats like McWarren and McManning to talk about Constitutional duties, but I hope they don’t expect to be taken seriously outside of their partisan echo chambers. In the non-partisan world most of us inhabit, the economic recovery never happened and everything is going up except wages. Out here we understand it wasn’t a Russian click farm that got Trump into office, it was the despicable, utterly corrupt creature known as Hillary Clinton.

Democrats never dealt with reality when they had the opportunity after the 2016 election. It was easier to revive a McCarthyite Cold War and risk nuclear annihilation than admit the Clinton clan was electoral poison and the real majority of Americans are the ones too disgusted with their deplorable options to even bother casting a vote.

The Constitution to the McResistance is just a handy document to reference when it’s politically expedient to do so, and a document easily ignored when it’s their team in power.