One recent estimate has Washington having one lawyer for every 12 residents. As far as the media is concerned, when I started journalism in the 1950s over half the reporters in the country had only a high school education. Try to get a job today with that for your background. Richard Harwood once caught the social status of the press well describing his own experience a decade earlier: "We were perceived as a lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits. Thus I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room from contamination."
The sorry truth is that the sort of social intelligence that had once far more power in politics and decision-making has largely been replaced by the complex rules and language of lawyers and MBAs. Things have changed mightily including once easily understandable phrases like "public works" that are now "infrastructure."
As I followed the impeachment story I was struck by the reality that the lawyers were in charge once more. The possible solutions, approaches and language were controlled by them and the issue of how this might affect the thinking of tens of millions of voters got pushed aside. The media happily joined the attorneys.
Thus a president who has violated the law and shown contempt for justice and decency like no predecessor will now be primarily judged by how he handled a matter in a country about which most Americans know hardly anything.
I'm not saying Trump shouldn't be impeached - only that the case against him is too limited to encourage a strong participation by the public.
It's not too late to do something about this. Proceed with the impeachment but add a public House investigation into the ways Trump has violated, undermined or ignored the laws of our land, including but not limited to the Constitution. Here, from the Chicago Sun Times, is just one of scores of examples:
Since Trump took office, about 150 fewer scientists, technicians and other employees are working in the EPA’s Chicago Region 5, covering Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, according to EPA figures provided by the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 in Chicago, the EPA employees’ union....The number of inspections out of the Chicago office has plummeted by more than 60%, while inspections throughout the rest of the nation declined by 30%.This is a man who is destroying the country not just by bribery in Ukraine, but flagrantly ignoring the responsibilities of a president and distorting the purpose of laws. We need an honest accounting of these offenses even if they do not meet a lawyer's definition of impeachable. There are other ways in which we are being betrayed and, at the very least, the public needs a honest, detailed listing of them.
