Trump's acquittal means there is no bottom

It's truly a lawless presidency now

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Senate voted mostly along party lines to acquit President Donald Trump on the two articles of impeachment passed by the House of Representatives in December. By refusing to call witnesses, the Republican majority abdicated its responsibility under the Constitution to carefully or even cursorily consider the evidence before them, permanently tainting the proceedings. More consequentially, Republicans have fully embraced disgraceful and extraordinarily dangerous arguments about the president's essentially unlimited powers. The Senate majority's decision to legitimize, again, President Trump's lawless efforts to undermine U.S. elections places the country at the very precipice of democratic collapse, with only the November general election standing between us and slow-motion authoritarianism.

The threat to the future of democracy feels more tangible than at any time since the immediate aftermath of Trump's shocking 2016 election victory. The hope at the time was that our institutions might save us. But one by one, they have proven incapable of resisting the president's loud and relentless siege. The Supreme Court, whose majority now includes two crucial Trump appointees, has largely rubber-stamped the president's power grabs. Robert Mueller, a man who embodied The Institutions and their supposed disinterested and magical authority, could not be bothered even to make a recommendation about the president's fate, and his investigation into Russia's 2016 election interference and Trump's obstruction of justice was tossed aside. The Attorney General and his Department of Justice have both become unabashed accomplices to the Trump administration's extralegal ambitions.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.