Theresa May had a slim but viable Tory majority locked in through 2020 in Parliament. Owing to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act the Conservatives passed to protect their LibDem coalition back in 2011, even the change of leadership and the chaos of Brexit meant they could still hang on without having to call a new election. But she decided to call an election in 2017 anyway, thinking that her party could extend its grip on government and have a mandate to push ahead with Brexit.
Whoops.
The Tories no longer have a majority at all. They are dependent on a right-wing Northern Irish party for a majority, one that some Tories are already pushing back against. The Conservative backbench has already gotten the heads of May’s advisors as the quid pro quo for not turfing her out with a leadership contest which would almost certainly send the country out for another election. And oh by the way, EU negotiations over the terms of Brexit are scheduled to start a week from today – and the mandate for a hard Brexit has been blown into a billion pieces as it becomes increasingly clear that the Great British public would kind of like a do-over on the mistakes of 2016.
So say we all.
If there’s a recurring theme in 2017 politics worldwide, it’s that people are puking up the populism they were over served in 2016. In France, an explicitly pro-EU technocrat crushed Yet Another LePen in the election for President – and the pundits said “well he won’t have his own party in Parliament, he’s going to struggle, that’s the real election” right up until Macron’s new party won a landslide majority in Sunday’s voting. Angela Merkel, who some thought might be on the rocks coming into 2017, looks to be shaping up well as the new Leader of the Free World. And oh by the way, the American President is now down to a -20 split on approval rating.
This is the problem with American government: we have parliamentary politics but a divided-powers form of government. It yields a huge structural advantage to a party that wants to undermine the role of government and a party that bases itself heavily in small, rural, overly-white states. When the two dovetail, you wind up with what we get now: the United States of Alabama. While the majority of the country would like to be rid of it – after all, a plurality voted for the other leading candidate, not the winner – we don’t have a lot of options for solving this thing in the near future. Probably not until 2020, if we’re being honest.
Because here’s the thing: we’ve had three impeachments of a President in American history. None resulted in a guilty finding at Senate trial. The most recent one was an explicitly political act to try to undo what the GOP couldn’t accomplish twice at the ballot box, a ginned-up perjury trap formed from a six-year fishing expedition. The secondary impact was to utterly tar impeachment as a political process and effectively undermine its legitimacy for the future – maybe as revenge for Nixon, who knows, but the point is this: we’ve never actually removed a President that way. Nixon resigned rather than go to trial in the Senate. There are no circumstances right now under which this Senate could muster the votes to convict a Republican President.
And what if they could? Bear in mind that even if “the system works” as the goo-goos like to say, think of the implications around what it would take for half the GOP to turn on their incumbent. Something really really bad would have to have happened, and that means that sure, he’s gone, but we’re also reckoning with the consequences of whatever thing made it possible for the Senate to do the deed – collusion with foreign powers, massive abuse of authority, a dead girl and a live boy, whatever – along with, in all likelihood, the activation of a rump faction that has spent decades now dying for an excuse to want to need to use their guns. People hoping for a neatly-timed assassination are asking for a world of nightmares – if you thought the country went seven bubbles off plumb after September 11, and it did, try to conceive of the world of shit that would be unleashed if someone took a shot at the President and succeeded. Hint: you don’t want those problems.
The time to sort this thing out was in 2016. We don’t have the same sort of puke-and-rally mechanism a parliamentary system comes with. Right now is the time to work on flipping the Congress in 2018 to further mitigate the damage, but thinking we have an escape route in less than three and a half years is a fool’s errand. In the meantime, there’s a perfectly usable political party and institutions of government, and the thing to do is use what we have right in front of us instead of trying to magic up some sort of miracle-erase undo solution.
Because no matter how things turn out – even if Kamala Harris has her hand on the Bible on January 20, 2021, looking at a 350-seat Democratic House and 70 seats in the Senate, and the land of milk and honey and fried catfish is at hand – we’re never going to have not elected Donald Trump. That’s something we have to deal with, not wish into the cornfield. And there are a lot of implications to that. Of which…