America Is Waiting for a Confession That Will Never Come

Trump wants his impeachments erased. A growing number of Democrats want Congress to give him a third.

At last, bipartisanship.

Everyone wants the federal government to handle their emotional paperwork.

Trump wants history to issue a correction explaining that everyone was very mean to him. Democrats want history to stamp WE TOLD YOU SO across his forehead in permanent ink. The Constitution, written to contain power, has somehow been recast as America’s most expensive couples counselor.

One side wants the permanent record scrubbed. The other wants another entry added. Meanwhile, Americans are paying rent, buying groceries, worrying about healthcare, watching another war expand, and wondering whether anyone in Washington still remembers that government has responsibilities beyond validating the feelings of people who already have cable news shows.

I have already been told that refusing to promise Trump a third impeachment makes me worse than a Republican. Apparently Democrats have developed our own version of the RINO test. We call ours DINO, because bipartisan cooperation survives wherever it can make everyone worse.

Let me make something clear before the loyalty police arrive with their clipboards.

Trump may have earned another impeachment.

His conduct deserves fearless investigation. If Congress uncovers a grave, specific, provable abuse of power that threatens the republic, the House may have a duty to impeach even when conviction looks unlikely. The anticipated cowardice of the Senate cannot erase the oath of the House.

There is a profound difference between arriving at impeachment after an honest investigation and announcing impeachment as the reason Democrats need to win an election.

When someone says, “We have to win the House so we can impeach that motherfucker,” they are not describing a governing program.

They are describing a fantasy of completion.

In that fantasy, the House votes and something inside America finally clicks into place. The institutions rise from the dead, brush the dirt from their robes, and announce that the adults have returned. Every person who spent the last decade warning about Trump receives a certificate confirming that the panic, rage, ruined holidays, and seventeen thousand hours arguing with Uncle Gary under Facebook posts were completely justified.

The entire national nightmare gets placed into a folder marked RESOLVED.

None of that will happen.

Housing policy has very few perp walks. Healthcare reform rarely ends with the villain being escorted from the building. The price of insulin has never fallen because a committee chair said “high crimes and misdemeanors” slowly into a microphone. The electrical grid remains stubbornly indifferent to who won the argument on MSNBC.

Yet those are the things government can change.

Donald Trump has spent more than a decade making every room in America about Donald Trump. Democrats should resist the temptation to renovate the room.

He wants to be the sun around which all politics moves. Every investigation, insult, indictment, rally, prosecution, acquittal, and furious response feeds the same arrangement. His supporters defend him. His opponents prosecute him. The cameras remain fixed on him. The country becomes the unpaid supporting cast in a show that somehow gets renewed despite everyone claiming to hate it.

Here is the question neither party wants to answer honestly:

If the people you believe betrayed America never confess, never apologize, and never suffer enough to satisfy you, do you still want a democracy with them?

That question has teeth because democracy is an arrangement for sharing a country with people whose judgment can appall us, whose votes can endanger us, and whose Facebook posts occasionally suggest that carbon monoxide deserves another chance.

Republicans must decide whether the law applies when their president is the one breaking it.

Democrats must decide whether improving the country still counts when Trump and his supporters never admit Democrats were right.

Both parties must decide whether justice has a standard beyond the identity of the person holding the gavel.

If democracy requires the other side’s humiliation before we can participate in it, we do not want accountability.

We want surrender.

Tell the truth. Draw the line. Enforce the law. Improve people’s lives. Leave somewhere to stand for those who finally become tired of grievance and want to walk away from it.

Then stop waiting for the country to say we were right.

Build one that proves it.