As the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the liberal media drive to convict and throw President Donald Trump out of the White House, saying it’s the most important political question ever, the fact is most of the seats open to the public at the Senate’s trial on impeachment charges have been empty. Their hysteria and hyperbole is driven by their belief they don’t have a candidate who can beat him in November. At the same time, they confront the reality that it’s virtually impossible for them to cobble together the two-thirds Senate majority needed to oust Trump.
Many workers wonder how the damning “evidence” against Trump — that the president attempted to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption, including the $50,000-a-month Ukrainian natural gas company sinecure held by former Vice President Joe Biden’s son — is in any way different from how all U.S. administrations have bullied smaller nations to do as they wish. Biden himself was famous for this as the point man for foreign policy operations in the Barack Obama administration.
Nonetheless, the liberal press continues to ballyhoo new “bombshells,” like outtakes from the draft of a book by former National Security Adviser John Bolton, about the president’s crimes.
In reality, as Democrats became less confident they could select a candidate that has much chance of winning against Trump in November, their response was to step up efforts to eliminate him from the contest.
They’re convinced that the “deplorable” workers who voted for Trump in 2016 — who they falsely charge are racist and xenophobic — or who didn’t vote at all, will do so again. But workers voted as they did not because they are backward, but because they’re sick of suffering the effects of today’s capitalist crisis, which is visited on them daily, and of the disdain toward them from the “swamp” in Washington.
In their 24-hour-long opening statement, the impeachment trial managers, appointed by House Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have made it clear that the trial in the Senate has little to do with Ukraine or the facts.
Trump will always “cheat in an election,” Adam Schiff, the Democrats’ chief prosecutor, said, and therefore “the president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote was fairly won.”
“He is who he is,” Schiff insisted, claiming, “You cannot leave a man like that in office.”
The Democrats’ answer is to find a way to restrict workers’ right to vote and to restrict other constitutional guarantees workers need to defend themselves — like due process, the right to confront your accuser and the presumption of innocence. These are the stakes for working people, who face similar attacks daily under the capitalists’ criminal “justice” system.
Workers need their own voice
Neither Democrats nor Republicans, nor Trump or Biden or any of the capitalist candidates of any stripe, offer a road forward for working people. That’s why the Socialist Workers Party has its own ticket — Alyson Kennedy for president and Malcolm Jarrett for vice president –— like it has in previous elections for decades. Working people need our own voice, our own program and a fighting course to replace capitalist rule with a government of workers and farmers.
The Democrats and Republicans are two rival parties that speak for the capitalist class, hoping workers will feel compelled each election to hold their nose and cast a vote for the “lesser evil.” Workers need their own party and a revolutionary independent working-class program to fight effectively against the attacks we face and to take political power ourselves.
Bill of Rights out the window
The frenzied Democrats are happy to toss constitutional protections — as well as civility and fair play — out the window in their drive to oust Trump.
They’ve relied as their chief allies on proven opponents of workers’ rights — like former FBI chiefs James Comey and William Mueller whose direction of the capitalist rulers’ political police in their spying and disruption operations against labor and political fighters is their calling card. Now they’re looking to John Bolton, a long-standing political operative on the Republican right, who they used to denounce as a demon.
While it’s no wonder workers have turned off their TVs, there are important questions of our rights at stake in this affair. If a wealthy real estate mogul who is president of the United States can be denied the constitutional right to due process, to be innocent until proven guilty, to be able to confront his accusers, what does that mean for working people, our unions or working-class political parties?