Mrs. Hastings and 11th Grade Impeachment
Paul Keane is a
retired Vermont
WORD COUNT: 756
My 11th grade history teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth
Hastings, was married to an FBI agent
and she taught a popular course at my high school about democracy. Everybody
knew her husband was a “G-man” but nobody mentioned it except in whispers.
Never talk about politics or religion my mother told me. So
I won’t go off on the particulars of the
2020 presidential impeachment which seem to have driven so many Americans to
despair over the last few months. People of all persuasions claim that
impeachment has proved one thing; Democracy doesn’t work.Tell that to Mrs. Hastings, at
Mrs. Hastings proudly taught a course called “Problems of
Democracy”. Students just called it
P.O.D..
Notice it was called Problems of Democracy not Solutions of
Democracy. And democracy had plenty of problems.
It is thanks to Mrs. H. that I understood every twist and
turn of the fully televised Presidential Impeachment Hearings of 2020.
And it is thanks to her that I can give you my own verdict
about democracy: It is not failing. It
is not declining. It is exactly where it
should be. It is doing exactly what the founders intended and what Mrs. H. made
us understand they intended: checking and balancing all three branches of
government, as if there was a scale with three weighing pans instead of two;
the executive pan, the legislative pan and the judicial pan, all of which
needed to be kept somewhat level.
We all knew that Mrs. Hastings had first-hand contact with
democracy with a big “D.
But that first-Hnd
contct was a secret never to be mentioned in public for fear it would endanger
her husband’s life . Mrs. H. was married to an FBI agent who would disappear
from home for weeks, maybe months at a time on secret missions for the
government.
We all imagined him with men in trench-coats and fedora hats
in dark alleys, but when the American Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
It was thrilling to think that my own history teacher’s
husband had to disappear from his home for months at a time and nobody was
allowed to mention it.
So why do I say democracy in America in February 2020 is
doing just fine when half the country thinks impeachment was a failure and the
other half thinks it was a victory?
It’s because Mrs. Hastings taught us that impeachment is
only half the process. The other half is a trial and a verdict, and we all know
in 2020 just how unpredictably maddening verdicts can be: just recall the trial
of O.J. Simpson.
If you look it up in the dictionary you discover that the
word unimpeachable means “not able to
be doubted, questioned or criticized:
entirely trustworthy.”
The House found behavior that was not entirely trustworthy,
not unimpeachable. The Senate after hearing the House’s evidence disagreed.
And there it stands.
So why do I say democracy worked? Because the entire country saw the trial:
House prosecutors vs. Executive defense
attorneys. Because the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court heard every scintilla
of evidence presented in the trial. Because
all 100 members of the Senate, were required to be in attendance,
without their cell phones or any stimulating beverages other than water or milk
(chocolate apparently allowed.)
In other words, the machinery of the U. S. Constitution
turned its gears in exactly the manner the Constitution envisioned, with the
exception of televised hearings, a possibility no signer of the Constitution
could have imagined in 1787.
One can argue about the justice of the outcome, but that is
what America
But nobody can say any branch got to tip the scales.. And those scales were unique: Lady Justice
had three weighing pans not the usual two: a legislative pan, an executive pan
and a judicial pan.
Impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate , however raggedy both may have been, went through to the end.
And the three weighing-pans of Democracy, and its problems
as Mrs. H. taught me, continue their endless rebalancing act. But three pans
can’t achieve a stable balance.
Mrs. Hastings taught us the Constitution provided a fourth
weighing-pan: The Press.
Democracy thrives.
