We’ve moved on from the trial of the century — involving former President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment— but the fallout continues. The “magnificent seven” Republican senators who voted with the 50 Democratic senators to convict have faced blowback at home. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who voted to impeach Trump and is crusading for a Republican Party devoid of him, has been shunned by family members, one of whom, a literal Karen, sent his father a $7 certified letter in which she stated that Kinzinger was “a disappointment to God.” (Does she have him on speed dial?)
Perhaps most interesting is the clash of those Homeric heroes (not), Trump and Mitch McConnell, a face-off four years in the making that began when the Senate Minority Leader, like Odysseus, tried to navigate between the proverbial rock and a hard place, voting not to convict to try to appease the Republican base but then offering a blistering rebuke of Trump’s behavior before, during and after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol to try to woo back skittish Republican donors.
As we have seen recently, half-in, half-out never works, which is why Queen Elizabeth II stripped the leave-taking Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, of their royal highness titles and their patronage duties.
But we always want to have our cake and eat it, too, don’t we? I myself am antiabortion. But I don’t ever want o see women controlled by men. And yet, when I read this New York Times article about a Milwaukee mother and grandmother who has six children and one grandchild and is struggling to make ends meet with two minimum wage jobs — the article is about the need for government assistance — all fairly liberal me could nonetheless think was, Wait a minute: She has six kids at age 39?
No one should have six kids by age 39 — no one, unless you’re Brangelina with millions and a staff of servants. And that’s why I thread the needle by advocating not only for safe, effective, affordable birth control but for education, particularly for women, so that they will understand that, as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus puts its, “there is a world out there” — in this case, one of higher education or at least job training and better-paying jobs that should afford women the springboard to a better life before they consider marriage and/or motherhood.
Is that easy? No, but navigating between the rock and the hard place never is.