The Fatal Consequences of Courting False Expectations

Keeping something in the fridge too long makes our minds up for us. It’s a wasteful approach to handling leftovers, but once they start to stink no one would blame us for throwing them out. Nor would anyone psychoanalyze us about why we left them in there for so long. That part’s clear: We were lazy, unable to face the decision, and put it off until there was no real decision to make. 

Not to be passed off as lightly are politicians who resort to the same flabby practice. While happy to accept salary, title, prestige, media coverage, and expense account that come with their honored position, they choose too often to defer the difficult issues they were elected to address. By the time the stink from their abstention rises, they have slipped away — to another committee, another position, perhaps Cancún¹ — leaving the dereliction of responsibility for someone else to defend. The public won’t know. They never do. 

Think Trump. Think Israel.

U.S. GOP senators fussed about the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump that charged him with inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection. On January 13, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s demand to reconvene the Senate in order to start the impeachment trial while Trump was still in office.² Instead, McConnell asked Schumer to have the House’s presentation of articles of impeachment delayed until January 25, stating Trump deserved more time to prepare his case. Schumer obliged. Other GOP senators agreed with McConnell’s consideration. With Trump impeached so soon after the Capital riot — just one week had elapsed — a short delay was only right.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham: “A couple of weeks, I think, would be necessary for the president’s people to make their argument most effectively. I think it’s fair to the Senate; I think it’s fair to the president.”³

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski: “I think what McConnell laid down was eminently reasonable, in terms of making sure that we got [due] process. The process has to be fair. So yeah, so we gotta get started, I guess.”⁴

With that exemplary commitment to do what was right and fair, the Senate lost no time in scuttling the impeachment effort. 

On the strength of quibbles, Trump was acquitted with GOP senators conveniently ducking the embarrassment of having to declare Trump as either guilty or innocent. With their clever tactic, they aborted the second formidable purpose of conviction: disqualifying the offender from future office.

Prior to the trial, McConnell announced that not Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts but Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) would preside. Stripping the trial of Roberts’ august oversight freed the GOP senators to challenge the constitutionality of subjecting a private citizen to the impeachment process. In case that objection didn’t stick, they pointed out that, since the purpose of impeachment is to remove a president from office, it was senseless to convict Trump; he no longer was in office. On the strength of those quibbles, Trump was acquitted with GOP senators conveniently ducking the embarrassment of having to declare Trump as either guilty or innocent. With their clever tactic, they aborted the second formidable purpose of conviction: disqualifying the offender from future office. 

So here we are. Roberts was dragged back this week as the Supreme Court was called on to decide the issue the Senate deferred in 2021: if Donald J. Trump engaged in insurrection and should, as a consequence, be excluded from the 2024 ballot.⁵ The difference is the rot the three years of procrastination have wreaked. During that time, Trump has spared no effort in flooding media outlets with his incendiary rhetoric: He accused liberals and everyone else not for him of blocking — by any foul means at hand — his becoming President of the United States again. After expertly egging on both factions, Trump now warns bedlam will break out if anyone interferes with his election campaign. Those taking that message most seriously are his supporters, who are girding up, standing by, and locking and loading (whatever that means). No matter how SCOTUS decides at this point, one faction will feel a mighty injustice has been done them and will have less confidence in the supreme law of the land than ever.

Such is the stink that develops when issues are put off. But it gets worse. Take the Palestine question. 

In January 23, 1923, the League of Nations mandated the United Kingdom to administer the territories of Palestine and Transjordan. In doing so, it conferred an unexamined and impossible responsibility on the mandatory Power: to encourage the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine without stating what a Jewish national home is. Although no precedents for such an entity existed in international law and there was no legal definition for it, the Jews were promised a national home in Palestine. The vagueness of the term, the UN Special Committee on Palestine concluded in its 1949 report,⁶ was intentional: 

[It] had the advantage of not shocking public opinion outside the Jewish world, and even in many Jewish quarters, as the term “Jewish State” would have done.

Under the leeway this evasion afforded, the Jews of Palestine had by 1949 brought in as many immigrants as they could, developed the economy, laid the foundation for industry, cultivated Palestine’s wastelands, and introduced irrigation systems, while improving the living standard for Jews and Palestinians alike. They had built ambitiously on the strength of the international pledges made to them. When questioned as to the daunting extent of their expansion — in effect, squeezing the Palestinians — they insisted they “could not be halted in midstream.”⁷

The Arabs had a pledge of their own to present: Besides having been in Palestine for centuries and claiming a natural right to remain in undisputed possession of it, they had been ensured independence during World War I in exchange for breaking with the Ottoman Empire and allying with Great Britain, which they did. The very existence of a Jewish national home in Palestine violated that promise of Arab national self-determination. In rejecting the presence of a Jewish national home in their country, Palestinians also refused to cooperate with the Mandate’s attempt to bring the two peoples together, something the Jews resisted as adamantly. 

The mandatory Power pressed on with its support for a Jewish national home, assuming the Palestinians would come to accept it. That assumption was wrong. Neither, to its dismay, were the Jews willing to accept the presence of the indigenous population. We are now witnessing the horrors exacerbated by this wanton dereliction of duty. 

The scenes and news from Gaza must make us realize we can no longer tolerate politicians who skirmish around issues without tackling them. For the most recent example, we need look no further than the GOP senators who, after pressing for a bipartisan border security bill, promptly voted it down. The human suffering incurred from such procrastination, dithering, and just plain politicking is measureless, the damage irreparable, the cost incalculable. Instead of doing their jobs, our elected representatives have been getting away with blithely slipping infants into streams headed for future generations not knowing if those infants are Davids, Goliaths, or Frankensteins. We must let them know we will tolerate it no longer.

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1. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) flew to Cancún, Mexico, during the worst winter storm in a many Texans’ memory. The fatal consequences of the storm was due to a power outage for 4.5 million homes in part as a result of the state’s opting to rely on voluntary rather than mandatory regulation under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, resulting in the state’s substandard services and infrastructure. ↩︎
2. “McConnell won’t reconvene Senate early for impeachment trial,” Axios, January 13, 2021. ↩︎
3. “Top Senate Republicans push to delay Trump impeachment trial,” The Washington Post, January 21, 2021. ↩︎
4. “Schumer agrees to two-week delay of Trump’s impeachment trial,” Politico, January 22, 2021. ↩︎
5. The Supreme Court decided the issue on different grounds: whether states have the authority to exclude Federal candidates from their ballots. Part of the consideration, whether Trump is guilty of insurrection — the reason why the states want to exclude Trump — could be handily ignored. That charge will be brought before another judge in another court at some other time after all the little legal bombs that legal systems are famous for planting in the way of justice have been defused. ↩︎
6. “United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. Volume 1 : report to the General Assembly,” Lake Success, New York, UN, 1947. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎