Today the impeachment trial for Donald Trump begins. I fail to understand why this process has been so convoluted. The roadmap for how to proceed, which was set forth by our forefathers, is apparently unclear and open to interpretation. Why has the House of Representatives and the Senate been given the power not only to conduct the trial hearings, but to make the final decision? The trial has begun with the setting of ground rules, but shouldn’t these rules already be in place? There has been so much disagreement about how this trial is to be conducted, that it is like the blind leading the blind. It seems to me that if it is the people who vote a president into his office, it should be the people who also vote him out of office.
The most disturbing fact about impeachment is that it is no guarantee that the evil we wish to eradicate through the process of impeachment will be stopped. The trial itself merely establishes the fact that the accused is impeachable. It does not automatically ensure his removal from office. The Senate can only have the president removed from office with a two-thirds vote (67 out of 100 senators) but the trial can go on for weeks. In the unlikely event that he is actually removed from office, the vice president would fulfill the presidential shoes to the end of the current term. The really bad news is that unless a vote actually succeeds in preventing Trump from running for re-election, there is nothing to stop him from doing it.
I was dismayed when Marianne Williamson dropped out of the presidential race a couple of weeks ago, but as a woman I am very proud that she hung in there for as long as she did. I learned a lot from listening to her campaign speeches. What I learned was how rigged our election system is. Apparently you can only become president of the United States if you are obscenely wealthy. Still, while I agreed with all of Marianne’s plans for the many issues our country faces, I feel that the only candidate still in the race, who understands the most important issue, is Tom Steyer. He knows that climate change is the most critical challenge we are facing, along with the corruption in our government. Until these issues are addressed, everything else is trivial.
The American people are currently distracted by the impeachment proceedings, but we must stay focused on what matters. If our attention is on Donald Trump and the mess he has made, we only lower ourselves to his level of behavior. We must look away from the evil so as not to give it power and look instead towards the good that we each can do. We must know that Divine Justice will prevail. Love will win. Let’s turn our attention to the most pressing problem – climate change – and seek solutions. Let’s support those who understand that this is the most important challenge we face. This is what truly matters.
