It seems to me we are on the verge of creating some bad precedents that will haunt us in the future.
Take the case of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The House is about to vote on stripping her of her committee assignments because of comments she has made in the past, before she was elected. Now it is true she has said some pretty off-the-wall things, since she apparently believes a lot of the crazy QAnon conspiracy stuff. But I worry about the precedent of the majority stripping an elected representative of legislative power just because we don’t agree with them. That precedent opens up a lot of potential for abuse in the future.
Then there is the idea being floated of voting to deny Trump the ability to run for president again. Now I personally don’t want to see Trump in the presidency again, but this move sounds to me a lot like the candidate “vetting” that Russia and Iran do before their elections – ruling out certain candidates simply because they don’t fit the party line. The proper way, in my opinion, to deny Trump another term is to offer candidates that can beat him in an open and free election, not to deny the American voter the chance to re-elect him if enough of them feel so inclined. The argument that we need to deny Trump the ability to run again because a large number of the American voters are likely to make the “mistake“ of re-electing him is unbelievably condescending and self-serving, and certainly doesn’t fit the premise of our form of government.
I have argued in a previous post that the current fad for using impeachment as a political weapon, first with Clinton and now twice with Trump, is a bad precedent. And certainly, it is now clear that Harry Reid’s move to eliminate the 60-vote rule in the Senate for confirming judicial appointment backfired on the Democrats once they were out of power under Trump.
We have already made the serious mistake of letting our rage and fear from the 9/11 attacks justify massive intrusions into our privacy and civil rights, and that is a very bad precedent.
There is that old saying that the “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. No doubt all these moves and proposals are made with the best of intentions, but it seems to me they all set bad precedents that may come back bite us in the future.
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