Breaking the Wrong Rules

This is a test. This is not, however, ONLY a test. The impeachment is testing the waters of accountability, the limits of presidential power, the resilience of the framers' design of checks and balances. It serves to see just how much people will accept in a leader's bad behavior, how much of a blind eye they will turn as power is transferred to the executive branch. Impeachment was crafted as the firewall preventing tyrants from tipping a democracy into an authoritarian regime, an autocracy. Trump and his billionaire backers want that kind of unchecked power, and impeachment is all that stands in their way from imposing it. Trump posed as a political outsider, someone who would "drain the swamp" of political stagnation. He promised working class voters he would break the rules that favored the rich and powerful. But surprise, surprise: he's one of them, and now is breaking the rules, but not the ones favoring the elites. He's power drunk, and already talks like a dictator saying he won't leave even if removed. He's not a rule breaker for justice or equality, not a hero reforming that "gull-dang big gummint," not a rebel working for the have-not white workers abandoned in the Rust Belt. He's a democratic institution crusher. The rules he wants to break are the ones standing between those of us who work for a living and the corporate powers that want to drain the last drops of profit from a system in crisis. He's turning up the volume so no one can hear the real reasons he's breaking the rules. He is not Robin Hood or a beleaguered defender of democracy. He is a corrupt despot, an agent of a ruling elite that can never have enough wealth or power.