I am frustrated with both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats have handled their long primary campaign poorly, and the Iowa caucuses will not fix that. And the Republican party has been reduced to “the party of Trump.”
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander rightly stated that the democrats produced so much factual content that there is little need for witnesses. Other Senators are now agreeing with him. But where they are wrong about acquittal is their assertion that it will properly allow the matter to be decided by the people in an election.
This is wrong because the president has already been attacking and making fun of adversaries, declaring that he alone can fix things, and asking foreign nations to help him get re-elected. This is the behavior of an autocrat, and acquitting him now will only allow this behavior to continue.
I have asked colleagues why they think the Republican Party has become the party of Trump. Fear of him they think is the reason. They listed fear of Trump’s Twitter attacks; fear that voters in their home districts will turn on them; fear that McConnell will take them off his list for PAC and lobby money; and in some cases even fear of physical harm. Maybe some Senate leaders even see a safe and powerful place for themselves in an autocracy.
When watching the State of the Union address, I suggest that you look for and evaluate details. How clearly does he give real substance to his claims? Also compare the tone of this “written for him” speech to his off-the-cuff and rambling pronouncements as president. Who is the real Trump?
This much is clear: With this acquittal the checks and balances system that our founding fathers designed to save us from a dictatorship could be coming to an end.
Larry D. Lauer 
Ask your GOP friends and the GOP members of Congress if they will allow a Democratic President the ability to ignore all requests for information as they have allowed Trump to ?
Good analysis of bad news, Middle-bro,
The lawyerly argument in Trump’s defense — that you can do anything to win so long as you really believe your hold on office is in the best interest of the nation — was a stunning breakthrough in constitutional law. Once again someone needs to rise in the halls of Congress and repeat the question: “Have you no shame, Sir?” But maybe we have had enough of rhetorical questions and impeachments whose outcomes are obvious in advance.
From the era of Octavius Augustus through Weimar, republics have fallen to tyrants because their politicians have yielded to the temptation to believe that they can use a popular demagogue for their own purposes and then reign him in before he does too much harm. They have never succeeded. Mitch and company might as well take off their power ties, put on their tutus, and declare themselves “handmaidens of tyranny.”
There are flaws in our Constitutional traditions. The founders warned of the dangers of partisanship, a danger magnified by a two-party system i place of the shifting party alliances of a parliament. The result has been the rise of a “power behind the throne” like Mitch McConnell. A mere “speaker” who has had the power to block the agenda of a two-term Democratic president by refusing to take up his legislation — and who, under a Republican president, has done the same thing to bolster that president’s mocking charge that the Democratic House is a “do-nothing” assembly.
There is another fundamental flaw in the Constitution that the electoral college hoped to finness. The patch is, however, failing as the demography of a once largely agrarian nation of small cities transforms itself in the era of the megapolis and international corporation. As globalism and deficit spending depress the economy and more and more people confront poverty, support for a tyrant (“Only I — a very stable genius like me — can save you!”) will only grow. The response from the Democrats may well be to follow the successful Republican example and nurture a “cult of a savior” of their own.
Abandon hope? Dan ________________________________