Warren’s impeachment motion on Trump is a major test for the US, but do they know it?

The United States of America is going through a major test and may not even realise it. The recent move by Senator Elizabeth Warren to impeach President Trump is a test of their 230-year-old Constitution. A country that prides itself on a document that is the very essence of its existence must now speak truth to power.

Senator Warren is the first democratic candidate to call for the impeachment process and this is based on evidence from the Mueller report on President Trump, which does demonstrate instances of him obstructing the processes of justice.

Although several colleagues in the Senate feel that initiating impeachment proceedings is a waste of time and money and not necessarily a voter priority, as an election is on the horizon and they feel that the centre of their attention should be on that very election, not on trying to kick someone out who appears to be on his way out.

Interestingly, looking at the Senator’s political history, she was hardly involved in politics growing up. She grew up in a home that would be considered average and middle class. She says her family was completely removed from political discussions and debate.

And due to that upbringing and environment, the only natural thing was for her to be registered as a Republican as everyone else around her was. Only until she really began to think about politics, by realising in the mid-1990s that the middle class were struggling to make ends meet while more affluent individuals, credit companies and cooperation’s were thriving, she felt she needed to change.

The very fact the Senator Warren grew up away from anything political and had no interest in politics, including that she was actually a registered member of the Republican party and is now a Democratic presidential candidate, shows that she was drawn to shift parties and become active.

There is one word that Senator Warren constantly keeps repeating and that word is principle, a matter of fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning.

America prides itself on the fact that it is a country that is controlled by the Constitution. That it provides justice to all, equally under the law. What would it mean for the USA’s self-appointed role as the democracy police of the world if it defied that very Constitution?

In most of our countries, we have come to “understand” how they work. Yes, we vote regularly. There is interference, but when was there never interference? We would not know what that looks like. Or for that matter, when it comes to information, we can name TV stations that are controlled by the state, or even newspapers; we can say that for Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania or Rwanda. The difference is, we know that.

The only thing that makes money valuable is that we believe it is, and we have created a system around it. The material is paper, just like the paper we use to do several other things, but value has been created by this specific paper. And that is how constitutions work, words on paper, but put value to the words, build systems around these binding words and they only add value when they are acted upon.

Nerima Wako-Ojiwa is executive director of Siasa Place. Twitter: @NerimaW