This was written by my daughter, Maggie Brady, as a response to Ezra Klein’s plea for “normalizing” impeachment:
In Ezra Klein’s article, “The Case for Normalizing Impeachment” (December 6, 2017), Klein argues that the United States should normalize impeachment in the case of an unfit president, especially when “leaving one in office could be worse.” Klein uses a variety of opinions from Democratic politicians and writers to further explain why the country needs to normalize impeachment and why we need to impeach President Trump. Klein uses various tweets from President Trump in order to prove his opinion and why it is valid. Directing his audience for the whole American people, particularly the U.S. legislature, Klein uses a firm yet sarcastic tone to entice his audience into implementing his new idea.
In this column, Klein is arguing for the impeachment of President Trump, but knows that the only way to do so is if the legislature begins to normalize impeachment. He believes that the country has “grown too afraid of the consequences of impeachment and too complacent about the consequences of leaving an unfit president in office.” Klein overall wants to answer his burning question stated in the beginning of the article, “Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president?” In this article he believes that the answer to his question is yes, but that the remedy has not been implemented correctly for quite some time, and therefore, is not a strong enough remedy. In his article, Klein mentions several times how unfit President Trump is and uses his tweets and the words of many Democratic representatives and writers to support this opinion. Klein is proposing that Americans may have simply made a mistake when voting for President Trump and that the country needs to fix this mistake. However, in this article Klein also touches on the danger of President Trump’s removal. Despite this, Klein works to persuade his audience to further acknowledge what impeachment could do for this “mistake” that the country has made.
Klein’s words do have a persuasive aspect in that they persuade his audience to normalize the idea of impeachment. Klein’s use of firm yet sarcastic diction helps him present impeachment in this article as a remedy to a mistake, rather than a concept that, if implemented, would only make the country worse off. The use of President Trump’s tweets and the commenting of these tweets to back his argument also provides a persuasive element to his article. Klein uses a great deal of logos in his article, using polls from the Military Times, quotes from The New York Times, and quotes from several respected representatives and like minded thinkers, Carl Bernstein, Rep. Brad Sherman, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, to name a few. However these examples of logos are quite biased in that they all follow similar opinions to that of Ezra Klein. A more persuasive argument would be one that used more information from Republican representatives who are for the impeachment of President Trump, and they do exist.
This article, in particular, is what drew me to follow Ezra Klein. His sarcastic diction and examples from other writers enticed me to read his opinion of President Trump and his take on the impeachment process. What I found was a similar view that impeachment should be considered more, but what I found different was over which president.
My question for Ezra Klein is, “What if it was a Democrat as president?” I ask this because almost every source that Klein used to support his opinion were completely biased in that none of these people were ever for President Trump. Furthermore, when Republicans proposed the impeachment of President Obama, the backlash was extremely prominent. Republicans were considered to be “sore losers” for wanting to impeach a President just finishing his first year in office. And personally, although President Obama raised taxes, invaded Libya, and created a healthcare plan that to me, did not help the amount of Americans it was said to help, President Obama still did great things for this country. However, it took him more than a year to complete all of this. If the president “at large” was from “the other side” as Trump, then the idea of impeachment would be completely wrong.
Klein notes in his article from a commentator that “it’s proven to be a partisan tool and nothing more.” Klein argues it should not be partisan, yet his whole argument is quite that. Klein has created a hypocritical statement for his audience, one that may not persuade to normalize his idea of impeachment.
POSTSCRIPT: ADDED BY BRIAN BRADY: Interview with Ezra Klein on MSNBC