12 February 2021 — 0948 mst

Friday roundup: Gianforte and masks, impeachment

Unmasking Montana

Today Gov. Gianforte is expected to release a directive rescinding former Gov. Bullock’s statewide mask-up directive that many of Gianforte’s followers loathed and believed was an unconstitutional and immoral restraint on their God given right to infect other people. The directive may leave in place local mask-up mandates such as exist in Lewis and Clark County and Whitefish. I’ll provide a link to the directive when it becomes available.

Gianforte's decision to deep-six the statewide mask-up mandate fulfills a campaign promise. That's good politics. Whether it's good policy is an entirely different matter.

Gianforte’s decision to bless barefacing appears to be based on three arguments:

Senate Bill 65 protects businesses and organizations against most allegations they are not exercising due diligence to reduce the spread of Covid-19 by raising the bar for a successful lawsuit so high it will seldom be met. The bill passed on a largely partisan vote, with two Democrats, both in the senate, voting for it, and four Republicans, three in the house and one in the senate, voting against it.

Vulnerable populations — the elderly and chronically ill — are being vaccinated, and thus presumably protected. That’s true, but (1) those populations are a long way from being fully vaccinated, (2) the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are only 95 percent effective, and (3) the younger populations that interact with the elderly, the chronically ill, and residents of veterans and group homes, have not been vaccinated yet. Health care workers are being vaccinated, but not oldsters’ young friends and family. There is no way to prevent those interactions.

The daily number of new cases is declining. Again true — see the state of Montana’s plot below. But the decline is not because Mr. Covid pulled up stakes and moved to South Dakota. Rather, it’s because masking requirements, curfews on saloons, and eatery occupancy and group size restrictions were slowing the spread of the virus. Loosening those measure may have the same effect as discontinuing a medication after it has brought down one’s blood pressure.

If a glut of Montanans cast off their masks and mingle as though Mr. Covid never existed, a distinct possibility, and new Covid-19 cases increase to the point where another statewide mask-up mandate is needed, Gianforte will find himself in a mighty damned hot political pickle. He’s gambling that vaccinations will obviate that predicament. I hope he wins, but I think the odds he will are a lot longer that he supposes.

I do not look forward to shopping for groceries in Kalispell in the coming weeks.

Impeachment

The house’s impeachment managers made a powerful case that ex-president Trump spent months lying about the election to his gullible hardcore followers, ginning them up to serve as shock troops in a mob attack on our nation’s Capitol that was intended to somehow keep him in office despite having lost the election big time and fairly and squarely. He led an insurrection. I doubt his attorneys, who appear hapless because the law and the facts leave them with no plausible defense, will blow apart, or even put a serious dent in, the prosecution’s case.

That notwithstanding, Trump appears headed for another acquittal because almost all Republicans have a loyalty to Trump, or a fear of Trump, or both, that is higher than their loyalty to the constitution and the rule of law.

The lesson of Trump’s high crimes and the failed attempts to hold him accountable for them is that there is no practical legal way to remove a president from office before his term ends; not through impeachment, not through the 25th Amendment. The authors of the constitution recognized the possibility that a president might need to be removed from office, but the remedy they provided, impeachment, has been proven to be ineffective, as has been the 25th Amendment.

The nation’s fortunes now rest on having a president of good character and sound judgment. With Joe Biden, we’ll have such a president for the next four years. After that, who knows what will happen? Donald Trump did not know how to govern. He drove himself out of office by bungling his administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The next strongman may be a lot smarter and effective.

I believe the only remedy is amending the constitution so that our nation’s chief executive is chosen by the lower house of our national legislature. That system does not weed out all rogues and would be dictators, but through votes of no confidence it can fire, and fire swiftly, a chief executive who commits high crimes or otherwise becomes a danger to his nation. Witness the experience of parliamentary democracies throughout the western world. It’s a change we need to make, and to make pronto, but the odds we will recognize the need for it and act accordingly are perishingly small. But if we do not make it, the odds our democracy will perish from another demagogic sociopath’s becoming president are fearsomely large.