For its nearly 250 year history, the United States has managed to avoid collapse by virtue of fragile civil norms, no small amount of luck, and “presidential character and self-restraint,” says Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic. That's not to say that American democracy has any inherent moral superiority; even the most cursory glance at our history shows plenty of scars and stains. But for better or worse, this nation still exists because a lot of old white men chose to uphold some key democratic ideals when, as the Trump administration has amply demonstrated over the last four years, they absolutely didn’t have to.
I've heard it argued that Trump's second impeachment was a waste of time, and there’s logic in that. The Biden administration got a late start due to Trump’s heel-dragging, and with multiple national crises underway, a fully-staffed executive branch is an urgent need. Furthermore, the speed with which the House approved the lone article of impeachment - and the sharp partisan divide in the voting - left many Americans feeling like this was just another round of political point-scoring. Esoteric questions of precedent and jurisdiction pale next to an inability to pay rent. Under the circumstances, as a country waiting for the cavalry to arrive, these priorities make perfect sense. But the circumstances are symptoms of a deeper existential threat which cannot go unchecked.
Rauch’s article outlines the five biggest changes that Trump made to the "unwritten rules" of America - the standard operating procedure that fills the space between the ink on the page of the Constitution and the day-to-day work of running a modern nation. In each case, Trump butted up against boundaries between the executive and other branches of government that aren’t often tested (that’s Rauch’s “presidential character and self-restraint”). In each case, Trump found the barrier softer than any of us expected. The result is a de facto expansion of executive authority that threatens the balance of governmental powers and tilts us toward authoritarianism.
As written, the Constitution has a mechanism for dealing with a president like Trump. It’s not for nothing that Congress, as the branch of government most directly representative of the will of the people, was constructed as explicitly co-equal with the executive. The House and Senate have the authority to investigate, impeach, and remove an officeholder as a check against precisely this kind of expansionism.
No system can account perfectly for every eventuality. The founders knew this; that’s why they wrote into the Constitution instructions for changing it. Here, I fall back on my familiarity with technology: most systems are stress-tested before they are pushed to a live environment, and even then, they’ll be constantly monitored and improved as flaws are found. In order to find the flaws, however, the system must be used at scale, and used as intended. Even if we knew there was a bug - even if we knew the Senate would never convict Trump - the exercise was valuable. It shows us where our weaknesses are, and what we need to fix. And it shows us the cost of neglecting to fix it.
Trump’s bad actions are not in question. Rauch highlights the ways he shamelessly grabbed powers for the presidency and dared anyone to stop him. If Trump’s behavior is not impeachable under the system as it exists, nothing is. That’s important to know - it tells us that our vaunted checks and balances are skewed. We also got a clear view of how an environment of extreme partisanship interacts with our mechanisms of accountability. The only question now is how we’re going to patch AmericaOS and get ourselves out of this buggy beta.