Reply #131: Sent mine

[PATRICK]

When simple duty requires enormous moral pressure and acts of heroism it is a measure of the danger to the law and a measure of the villainy it must be applied to.

This same logic is embraced by those concerned to do harm to the republic for political gain. Impeachment has been rarely used and twice to its full extent for partisan purposes with relatively small legal rationale for its justification. As a result, lawfully minded people have avoided the remedy even when dutiful and indeed necessary to the nation. Watergate did not pursue as much as required after the relief of the Nixon resignation. As with the Clinton impeachment, the rationale of healing and avoidance settled in to guarantee a crippling lack of follow-through and shelving of the principles of the Constitution itself. One might say the Nuremberg Trails fell short as well under the same justifications.

One blanches at beginning and looks right away for an end. In later years one has regrets and doubts when it comes back with a vengeance. The scale of the malfeasance and the threat to law itself, the nation itself, is so appalling and so legislatively difficult and uncertain is another backward justification with the same complicitous, dangerous result. To do one's duty without guarantee of outcome is heroism. It is a measure of what must be countered.

The simple duty is to pursue the course. The not so simple thing is to do it with force, speed and follow-through and by all means to enlist the engagement of the American people in a fair examination of the truth under its own assault by the same forces involved in the offenses of the executive branch.

Impeachment alone can right the perspective and restore the actual functioning of a legitimate government of the law and of the people. The abandonment of this remedy has mutated the government reality into the destructive impunity we see to today and will continue to see even if the evasive Democratic nominee stumbles evasively through uncountered fraud into the ravaged chief executive position. In this you have my full support, because you are no oath breaker, no secret allegiance to some darkly higher good which the law was set down to check.