Impeachment Hearings Quotes

This is the week, the primetime hearings on insurrection and sedition, our last chance to make known and believed the ugly truth of our last president, the nefarious doings of his cohorts, the insanity we all witnessed and went through, the coup we just barely avoided. It's now or never. The jury is out, the jury of public opinion. The jury is us.

I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me!

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers—these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

This act of whistleblowing was not like other acts of whistleblowing. Historically, whistleblowers reveal abuse of power that is surprising and shocking to the public. The Trump-Ukraine story was shocking but in no way surprising: it was in character, and in keeping with a pattern of actions. The incident that the whistleblower chose to report was not the worst thing that Trump had done. Installing his daughter and her husband in the White House was worse. Inciting violence was worse. Unleashing war on immigrants was worse. Enabling murderous dictators the world over was worse. The two realities of Trump’s America—democratic and autocratic—collided daily in the impeachment hearings. In one reality, Congress was following due process to investigate and potentially remove from office a president who had abused power. In the other reality, the proceedings were a challenge to Trump’s legitimate autocratic power. The realities clashed but still did not overlap: to any participant or viewer on one side of the divide, anything the other side said only reaffirmed their reality. The realities were also asymmetrical: an autocratic attempt is a crisis, but the logic and language of impeachment proceedings is the logic and language of normal politics, of vote counting and procedure. If it had succeeded in removing Trump from office, it would have constituted a triumph of institutions over the autocratic attempt. It did not. The impeachment proceedings became merely a part of the historical record, a record of only a small part of the abuse that is Trumpism.

Might it have been possible for Napoleon to win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God. For Bonaparte to be conqueror at Waterloo was no longer within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of acts was under way in which Napoleon had no place. The ill-will of events had long been coming. It was time for this titan to fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the equilibrium. This individual alone counted for more than the whole of mankind. This plethora of all human vitality concentrated within a single head, the world rising to the brain of one man, would be fatal to civilization if it endured. The moment had come for incorruptible supreme equity to look into it. Probably the principles and elements on which regular gravitation in the moral and material orders depend had begun to mutter. Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers–these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

President Lyndon Johnson was forced to select a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Texas authorities were called upon to conduct the original investigation. There were too many suspicious people around the world who believed a conspiracy existed. Those rumors had to be squelched. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI never budged from its position that Lee Harvey acted alone. Any evidence that didn’t conform to this conclusion was ignored. Twenty-six volumes of witness testimony and exhibits were published, and only 8,000 copies were sold. No more reprints. The contradiction between the conclusions of the Warren Report, and the abundance of discrepancies in the other volumes, makes fascinating reading. Chief Justice Earl Warren, John J. McCloy and Allen Dulles were LBJ’s logical choices. President Kennedy didn’t trust CIA Director Dulles. Now JFK was dead and Dulles would be in charge of all possible “conspiracy” investigations. Richard Nixon, temporarily retired from politics for the first time since 1946, selected Rep. Gerald Ford to sit on this commission. Nixon selected Ford a second time when he ran home to escape impeachment during the Watergate hearings.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

Scaife rationalized his foundations’ funding of an obsessive investigation of President Clinton’s marital infidelities during the 1990s that came to be known as the Arkansas Project. Hiring private detectives to dig up dirt from anti-Clinton sources, the project funneled smutty half-truths to The American Spectator magazine, which was also funded by Scaife’s family foundations. Scaife’s foundations also poured money into lawsuits against Clinton, all of which helped whip up the political frenzy that led to the Clinton impeachment hearings.

But a U.S. official on Trump’s July 25 call threw sand in the gears by filing a whistleblower complaint. The story was clear: Trump and his cronies were undermining U.S. interests and using the power of the government to keep him in the presidency. In the public impeachment hearings that began in November, Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives made no effort to disprove the overwhelming evidence against the president.

After then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in a congressional hearing that she spoke with the president by telephone at around 10 p.m. that evening (by which point she knew that Ambassador Stevens had been murdered), the president and his other subordinates changed their story, reporting that the president had spoken with Secretary Clinton but providing few details and acknowledging no other contacts with top administration officials who were futilely responding to the attack.