CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATIONS
Thanksgiving
by
M.E. Boyd, Esq., “Miss Constitution”
#twill #tcot #Thanksgiving #sbalich
Last week Miss Constitution urged Republican House Intelligence Committee members to stop complaining about fairness in the Presidential impeachment inquiry and participate by asking pertinent, intelligent, and inciteful questions of the witnesses so that we, the public, could better understand the issues. They did and it was quite illuminating. The Founders, when discussing the impeachment provisions in the Constitution, were very concerned that the process would be used as a partisan exercise, and not as a rare method to remove a chief executive who had committed unpardonable offense to the nation. An unpardonable offense to the nation was not, to the Founders, petty crime as exemplified in state statutes, but a crime to the nation itself. Bribery is thus a crime for impeachment if it entails a foreign leader paying a President of the United States for the purpose of betraying his or her country.
If President Zelensky, of Ukraine, had offered to pay Donald Trump, personally, several million dollars to back off questioning Ukrainian corruption that would be the kind of bribery worthy of impeachment. That the President asked that the new President of Ukraine look at whether his country participated in our 2016 election and especially look at the self-dealing of the then Vice-President and his son is not bribery. He was not trying to “dig up dirt” on an opposing candidate, he was trying to root out any corruption between members of the executive branch, including the CIA and Department of State, and elected executive branch members in the United States, and the apparent illegal spying of the 2016 Trump campaign for the benefit of the Clinton campaign that involved several foreign countries including Russia, Italy, Great Britain, and Ukraine.
Listening to commentators, including a judge, talk about common statutory bribery as a “thing of benefit” for the President relative to a political opponent is absolute nonsense and not the kind of bribery the Founders had in mind for a Constitutionally elected President of the United States to be impeached. But let’s be clear; America is in her second Civil War. No amount of reasoning or facts is going to change what has become an intractable ideological war in our nation. Lincoln had the same problem in 1863, and although it was a “hot” war, it was nevertheless irreconcilable. In his most difficult and despairing year Lincoln issued this Proclamation. It speaks loudly to us now.
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world.
May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
Abraham Lincoln, October 3, 1863.
Miss Constitution hopes that those Americans with warm hearts and outstretched hands can pull their brothers and sisters to them in love and charity; asking no questions; demanding no amends; and that this toxic and unnecessary phase of our national life can pass into oblivion. Lincoln is pleading with us now. Shall we yet disappoint him after what he has given unfailingly to us?
Copyright©2019 M.E. Boyd, Esq., “Miss Constitution”
