‘Healing’ vs. Accountability
Terry H. Schwadron
Jan. 12, 2021
“A Time to Heal?” the Breitbart website asked sarcastically in its top heading before launching into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to the House to introduce a second impeachment of Donald Trump yesterday for inciting the Insurrection Day swarm into the Capitol last week.
It’s the theme that Republican leaders starting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., are taking to defer any attempts to pin blame on Trump for his obsessive attempts to overturn election results even to the point of sending rioters in his behalf to threaten lawmakers in session to confirm the presidential election for Joe Biden.
Those Republican leaders so far have offered exactly nothing in place of impeachment. With an obstinate Trump refusing to resign — or even to acknowledge his role in overheating what turned into insurrection — there has been no effective move to invoke the 25th amendment Republicans in the House moved to block a resolution yesterday tht would have forced the issue), or to substitute a censure for impeachment, or to move against their own members for challenging the elections, or to order criminal actions against Trump and speakers who lit the match on the fatal rioting.
There certainly is no public talk among Republican leadership about criminal charges against Trump or Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump or Rudy Giuliani.
Instead, there is appeal to “healing,” ironically the call of the Biden election campaign to bridge yawning national divisions, as if doing nothing will help us set this awful attack on democracy simply pass. Whatever their private feelings, and despite a few notable party defections, the Trump majority in Congress is yelling at us to just let it all go.
Trump loyalists in the Pentagon even referred to the coup attempt as “the Jan. 6, 2021 First Amendment Protests” in Washington, D.C.
Apart from all else, how is “healing” the order of the day when the FBI and others are warning about armed uprisings if Pence were to move on the 25th Amendment and for Inauguration Day. How much more divided could we be?
On Healing
Even any dictionary check on “healing” — the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again — starts with owning the problem.
The response to healing from a heart attack is not to walk away from smoking, alcohol, overeating and too little exercise; it is a medically imposed program to acknowledge the issue and make specific changes towards a more healthful diet and habit. The healing to breaking your leg or replacing your ailing hip is physical therapy and working through the pain.
Likewise, emotional healing from grief or substance abuse requires those familiar 12 steps to work from denial through acceptance. There is never a program that prescribes ignoring what has happened.
Why is it that the Republican prescription for inciting a riot is to invite Donald
Trump to take a good-bye tour of his greatest hits to build his legacy?
As Ari Melber at MSNBC noted yesterday, no one at a murder trial talks about “unity” to resolve the outstanding legal issues.
At the risk of impatience, we are several days from the attack, with no adequate explanation of why security failed at the Capitol, why approvals for deploying the National Guard were withheld, whether we are adequately prepared for the Inauguration and at state houses despite the threats for more attacks. It has been in news reports rather than official documents or briefings that we have learned that the Capitol police had received and ignored prior intelligence of trouble, that the House and Senate “sergeant at arms” had disliked the optics of National Guardsmen ringing the Capitol, or that Maryland National Guardsmen and the Washington police were kept waiting hours to respond by the Army. The official “memorandum for the record” from the Pentagon confirms delays in deployment even as senators and House members were in protection from the mob, but offers no explanation.
Then we find out that there are contradictions in all the self-promoting accounts, heightening the need for formal truth-finding.
Trump himself has offered no concession of his own role in incitement.
Apparently that’s ok to Republican leaders who see supporting impeachment as some kind of party embarrassment rather than an immediate act for public safety.
Owning Up
It’s bad enough that we’ve been through a months’ long divisive call to ignore the American elections. It’s worse that Trump loyalists launched a mob takeover of the Capitol, with some armed and others seeming prepared to take hostages and chanting to “Hang Mike Pence.”
But to insist that we use this moment to do nothing in order to “heal” divisions that won’t quit is disingenuous at best and hiding at worst. These are the same Republicans who were for ripping the Constitution last week to foment a crisis bases on fanciful election fraud promoted by and on behalf of Donald Trump. That was the opposite of healing.
Hell, these same Republicans were the ones even in protective areas of the Capitol who refused to wear coronavirus masks, the standard public health measure in a situation of longish confinement in a closed space. That is the opposite of healing.
Apparently robocalls went out from the Republican Attorneys General group to encourage participation in the mob, but, again, there was just shrugging about it yesterday, and insistence that they didn’t know that they had done so. Not healing.
These same Republicans already have announced plans to kneecap Biden’s Cabinet choices and his legislative program even before he takes office — and then want to talk about “healing” as an excuse for inaction about Trump — whose own flailing remarks have not included any self-criticism.
Healing here starts with owning up to what actually happened, calling out the presidential incitement and the congressional hypocrisies from over made-up election fraud. Healing here requires first acknowledging the serious injury to the country. Otherwise, there will be no covering the wound.
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