Trees and Butterflies; Why Mitch McConnell’s acquittal rational is wrong
When I tuned in yesterday to watch Mitch McConnell’s closing speech regarding his decision to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial for incitement of insurrection, I was honestly shocked. He was pulling no punches when it came to his assessment of Trump’s action. He sounded like a Democratic convert, still no matter how rosy his rhetoric, I knew he was going to vote to acquit.
After his long tirade against Trump, one which I believe officially kicked off the Republican civil war, he pivoted over to his final rational, one built on the constitutionality of the impeachment itself. He claimed that the process was not constitutional because the impeachment clause’s list of those could be impeached was exhaustive and did not leave room for private citizens to be included.
My piece here is to discredit this. I feel there are two ways I could go about this: my legal rebuttal for why I don’t think this interpretation of the statute is correct or why viewing the issue from such a narrow lens is fundamentally wrong. I’m not a lawyer so I’ll leave it to them to argue the former. Plus, I think the latter is more powerful anyway.
The piece of his logic that I want to focus on is the fact that this impeachment could open the door to the impeachment of private citizens moving forward. Electing to convict here means that next week, according to Mitch, we could impeach Ben Shapiro for the insensitive nonsense that he says (I’ll hold my tongue). This is the classic rationale called the Butterfly effect: a small decision now could have major unintended consequences in the future. I believe that there is a time and place for this logic and can help us from making potentially disastrous decisions, like how elements of the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarcerations of people of color.
This is not one of those times.
I believe there are some instances where the sheer immorality of the act at hand makes the argument invalid. Sure, conviction in this case would set the precedent that private citizens can be convicted of impeachable offenses, but we are not talking about a Ben Shapiro rant that makes you cringe. What we are discussing is in a different stratosphere of lack of morality: a president inciting an insurrection on the Capitol of the United States. Sometimes an act can be so egregious that implying that the butterfly effect applies is in it of itself extremely disrespectful to the subject of the act, in this case our democracy which we hold so dear.
Let my try to make my point a bit more clear using another example in history: the passing of the 13th amendment, the abolition of slavery, in 1865. One argument against the passage that came up is that, while slavery is wrong, the act of the government taking the property of individuals will open the door to the government seizing any kind of property it wants. Not being able to see the sheer immorality of the act taking place and being more concerned about the precedent is an example of not seeing the forest for the trees, the fact that humans were enslaved by other humans and were legally treated as property. Fortunately we had enough Senators who did not fall for this logical fallacy to take the first step to remedy America’s original sin.
So while a conviction of Donald Trump would have set the precedent of the conviction of a private citizen, let’s not forget the fact that that private citizen led an armed insurrection on the capital that had members of congress and the Vice President running for their lives and left many others without their lives, an act that he was impeached for AS PRESIDENT! As we’ve seen with the passage of the 13th amendment, this butterfly effect logic and failure to see the forest for the trees is the wrong thing to do and will forever leave those who chose to acquit Donald Trump on the wrong side of history.