As the United Kingdom was exiting the European Union, the Republican senators were abdicating their duty of oversight in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald Trump.
In other words, January 31, 2020 was a sad day for liberal democracy, with the UK leaving the most successful multilateral institution that brought decades of peace to Europe and the promotion of universal human rights, at the same time the party of Lincoln decided to entirely upend the Americans' careful system of checks and balances.
More than just constitutional crises on both sides of the pond, the impacts of these debacles threaten the make up of both countries: the UK faces separatist fervour in liberal-minded, europhile Scotland and to a lesser extent in Northern Ireland; the United States faces a more polarized country than at any point since their Civil War.
Further still, I cannot help but wonder how America moves forward from not only the impeachment saga, but from the Trump presidency. Trump's administration is more than just one that I happen to disagree with; it is truly a gang of rogues, hellbent on perverting the American government for their personal enrichment, with a noxious formulae of racial animus as political cover.
It will take more than a botched and aborted impeachment trial to clear the stain from the American presidency. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon; Barack Obama declined to prosecute the George W. Bush administration for lying about Iraq or anyone on Wall Street for their malfeasance leading to the Great Recession.
That type of "turning the page" cannot continue after the Trump presidency. America will need a full accounting of the corruption, the lies and the chaos of the past four years — G-d willing when a new president is sworn in next year.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has made fighting corruption a centrepiece of her diligent campaign, has said she will declassify and release all documents related to the Ukraine matter should she be elected.
That is a good start, but America — and the world — needs more. There is no way around the obvious charges of a political prosecution, but the fact of the matter is that there needs to be a special prosecutor appointed with full authority to investigate the Trump presidency for all its corruption, crimes and abuses of power. At the same time, there needs to be a mechanism to account for the foreign policy blunders and racist rhetoric we've seen — there is no easy example to point to of what such an accounting would look like, but I suppose the best approach would be a nonpartisan equivalent of a "Royal Commission".
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand used to joke that if she was elected president, the first thing she would do is bleach the Oval Office. That is more than a good political punchline; it's a democratic imperative.
The United Kingdom, for its part, will have to go through a period of intense introspection; it will take time and effort to disentangle British law from Europe's. Notably, the Human Rights Act is in limbo: with the UK withdrawing from the EU, it is unclear how an Act that takes a somewhat similar but lesser status to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms endures when the country the Act serves is no longer subject to the European Court of Justice. This is a fundamental issue, and there are more prosaic but no less vital issues around air traffic, commerce and trade, retirees living in Spain, foreign students and far more to untangle and address.
The UK will spend the next decade figuring out how to undo decades of integration with Europe, even as Scotland and Ireland spend the same time working to undo centuries of integration with England and Wales.
The UK and the USA are two countries, as Bernard Shaw said, separated by a common language. Now, they are united in grief of their own making, grief threatening the stability of their liberal democracies and the integrity of their civic union.
It feels oddly satisfying to know that in Canada, our scandals are about the prime minister paying too much for donuts or the opposition leader charging party donors for his kids' private schooling.
Photo Credit: The Times Of Israel
