Watching the opening discussions of procedures in the Impeachment Trial of Donald John Trump bring to mind Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. With all apologies to President Lincoln, I paraphrase:
“Three years and one day ago our electorate inaugurated, on this continent, a new President, conceived by a tainted election and dedicated to his proposition that one man was created more equal than the Constitution and all others. Now we are engaged in a great civil debate of that election and that individual, testing whether he, or any individual so conceived and so dedicated, was greater than the Constitution he swore an oath to defend. We are now met in the Senate to debate the investigation of that individual’s conduct since his inauguration. We have come to dedicate a portion of his term, as a test of our Constitution versus an individual and that Constitution’s potential final resting-place despite the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in its defense, and that that individual might succeed in being declared more equal than all others in defiance of the Constitution is abhorrent. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should intensely ponder this situation. But, in a larger sense, we cannot examine, we cannot consider, we cannot reason this issue without dispassionate consideration of all of the facts available. The brave persons, living and dead, who struggled for our Constitution since the birth of our nation have consecrated it far above our poor partisan powers to add or detract from it today or assert the power of an individual over it. The world will little note, nor long remember the arguments offered here, but it will never forget what the Senate did here. It is for We the People, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who debated here have thus far so nobly or ignobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from the near death of our Constitution we take increased devotion to the purpose of our Constitution for which others have given their last full measure of devotion — that We the People here highly resolve that the partisans shall cease their disloyalty — that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and belief in the Constitution, and that government of We the People, by We the People, for We the People, shall not perish from the earth.”
Sorry for any disconnects. It’s the best I could do in a fifteen minute break.
