Avalanche

The grounds are shifting, and an earthquake may follow. 

Ten Republicans defied their cult and accepted the prospect of having to go shopping with bodyguards for the foreseeable future to join in the vote to impeach. 

While the decision to eject Trump from office remains a minority view in the GOP, it is also unlikely that the hirsute vandals hooting around the halls of Congress represent the cultural and stylistic inclinations of the people in rural Wyoming and the Chicago suburbs who just tried to give Trump a second term. 

Nor are they indifferent to the decision to beat a uniformed police officer to death with a fire extinguisher nor, for that matter, lesser crimes like shedding armpit hairs over Nancy Pelosi’s stationery with your feet propped up on her desk. 

Mitch McConnell’s stunning signal that he’s undecided on the impeachment vote is a warning to the president that he’d better STFU and go quietly or he may find himself heading for the Arctic Circle on an ice floe.

According to a new poll (by "Avalanche Insights," no less), 44 percent of Republicans think Trump’s gang “betrayed American values,” and 29 percent think their actions were treasonous. His approval rating has dipped to its lowest point ever. 

In the coming weeks and months, we will be treated to a steady stream of arrests, indictments, and trials, all of which will repeatedly remind us in excruciating detail of the behaviors on display Jan. 6. 

Remarkably and almost sadly, the frat-boy perpetrators seem to be struck dumb by the fact that after they faithfully responded to a clarion call issued by the chief legal authority of the country, they nonetheless find themselves utterly defenseless and facing hefty prison sentences for doing so. We the citizenry are like schoolmarms confronting misbehavior at recess only to hear the familiar excuse that “Johnny dared me to do it!” “Johnny,” in this case, being the principal. 

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats must be rubbing their hands over the prospect of the reverse-Benghazi that they can and probably will play on their meathead counterparts across the aisle. Count on months of relentlessly tedious and yet explosive hearings on who undermined Capitol security, what orders were or were not given, how many sitting members colluded with the Chewbacca brigades, up to and including possible criminal acts. 

Add to that the possibility of a revealing exploration of racism within the Capitol Police itself, which left many nonwhite officers facing down an armed mob sporting Auschwitz tee shirts and Confederate flags. 

As the Fantasyland accusations fade of mass voter frauds that gave Biden millions of fake votes, the dozens of GOP members who backed Trump’s delusions are going to look increasingly seditious as well as silly.

It remains to be seen how much of this rather sudden reversal of momentum will spill over into a broader repudiation of not just Trump but Trumpism, the grotesque continuation of the decades-long upward redistribution of wealth, negligence of our grave ecological crisis, and permanent imperial war-making. 

Trumpism, after all, is less a breach with our recent past than an exaggeration of it taken to explosive new heights. Biden has made it clear that he has no interest in turning the ship of state any more than a few degrees toward sanity, but the Democrats’ control of two branches of government now cuts away convenient excuses about what they can and cannot do. 

The Trumpster fire of last week opens the door for us to catapult the political pendulum back in a humane direction at long last. Since we create our world, it’s an opportunity not to be wasted.