The Case to Impeach Trump for Bigotry

On May 16th, Representative Al Green, as he has many times since 2017, stood on the House floor to implore his
colleagues to initiate impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, this time with a copy of the Mueller
report in hand and an American-flag tie on his collar.

“Since [the report’s] release, we have had many persons, many of whom are members of this august body, say that
they have concluded that the President has committed impeachable acts,” Green said. “Some have gone so far as to
say he should be impeached. I’m one of them. We also have hundreds of lawyers, many of whom are prosecutors
and former prosecutors, say that if anyone else committed the offenses outlined in this document, the Mueller
report, that person would be arrested and prosecuted.”

“Hence,” he continued, “one can logically conclude that since this document addresses acts by the President, and
since the President is not being prosecuted—since the House of Representatives has not moved to impeach the
President—one can conclude that the President is, indeed now for some twenty-nine days, above the law.”

Although most Democratic leaders and most House Democrats continue to resist calls for impeachment, more and
more prominent Democrats, out of frustration with the Administration’s refusal to coöperate with the House’s
investigators, are inching away from the Party line—either in support of impeachment on its own merits or in
support of beginning impeachment hearings as a legal strategy to sustain subpoena requests.
In both cases, the Mueller report’s description of ten actions by President Trump that may have
constituted obstruction of justice is central to their argument. But there are other arguments for impeaching
Trump—ones that Democrats, even those most critical of the President’s conduct in office, are curiously reluctant
to make.

“I think the strongest case is his bigotry and policy,” Green told me in a recent conversation. “We shouldn’t allow
a bigot to continue to hold the highest office in the land. We hear people daily on television who call him a racist,
a bigot, who say he’s unfit—people in his own party have said he’s unfit to be the President. And the people of this
country gave Democrats an overwhelming majority.”

“I just don’t see how we can have this overwhelming majority understand that he is a bigot—that he has infused
his bigotry into policy—and not at some point decide that there ought to be a vote to impeach him for the bigotry
and policy,” Green continued. “And, by the way, you don’t need to conduct hearings on this, because the President
does it in plain view! It’s out there!”

In two impeachment resolutions—in December, 2017, and January, 2018—Green gave evidence: Trump’s efforts
to block immigration and travel from Muslim-majority countries, his ban on transgender people serving in the
military, his remarks about “very fine people” among the white-nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville, and
his complaint about immigrants coming from “shithole countries.” “In all of this,” Green’s January resolution
closes, “the aforementioned Donald John Trump has, by his statements, brought the high office of President of the
United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace and disrepute, has sown discord among the people of the United
States, has demonstrated that he is unfit to be President, and has betrayed his trust as President of the United States
to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, and has committed a high misdemeanor in office.”

Green’s preferred rationale for impeachment—bigotry—is grounded in the history of the process. The first
Presidential impeachment, Andrew Johnson’s, in 1868, centered on Johnson’s violation of a law called the Tenure
of Office Act. But the actual impetus for the impeachment effort, as Brenda Wineapple notes in a new book on the
episode, “The Impeachers,” was Johnson’s leniency toward Southerners intent on preserving white supremacy and
thwarting Reconstruction.
“There were people who wanted that man impeached because they really thought he was hindering and betraying
the cause of the war,” Wineapple told me. “They were outraged because he was restoring the country to what it
was, and they had a vision of the future—what it could be.”
That moral conflict was sublimated into a fight over the Tenure of Office Act, which Republican majorities in
Congress had passed, over Johnson’s veto, in an effort to prevent Johnson from firing the Secretary of War, Edwin
Stanton, who was then implementing Reconstruction and supported aggressive measures. Johnson ultimately fired
Stanton in early 1868, and most of the articles of impeachment are directly related to this dismissal. But the
procedural case that emerged against Johnson was preceded by broader indictments of his conduct.

“One of the so-called Radical Republicans called for Johnson’s impeachment early in 1867, and the actual vote on
impeachment didn’t happen for almost a year,” Wineapple said. “So impeachment had been in the minds of several
of the Radical Republicans early on precisely because of the way they interpreted the Constitution and the
conditions for impeachment. And they interpreted it broadly—the abuse of power. He had obstructed Congress.
But there was nothing that was an actual legal misdemeanor or what could be called a high crime or high
misdemeanor.”

That changed once Johnson finally dismissed Stanton. But, as Green noted in our conversation, the eleven articles
of impeachment passed by the House against Johnson went beyond his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The
tenth quoted at length from speeches Johnson that had made in a raucous tour to shore up his Presidency, including
one in which he accused Republicans of having provoked the New Orleans Massacre of 1866, in which forty-four
African-Americans were killed by white Democrats. “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skins, and
they are responsible for it,” Johnson said. With such comments, the tenth article charged that Johnson, “unmindful
of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof,” had attempted “to bring into disgrace,
ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States.”
Johnson was not removed from office. It is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Senate Republicans would
ever vote to remove Trump. The Democrats have pursued an intensely legalistic approach to confronting the
Trump Administration, in a quixotic hope that enough damning objective evidence might be found to force
Republican voters and Republicans in Congress to acknowledge the President’s wrongdoing. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as much in March: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that, unless there’s
something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.”

But the fact that an impeachment absent Republican support would be divisive and lead to Trump’s acquittal does
not mean that impeachment would be futile. The ultimate judges of the evidence presented in a trial would be the
American people, not the President’s apologists, who would be forced, during an election season, to defend
conduct that the majority of the public might find indefensible. We can see impeachment in the way that many
Democrats have been framing it—as a legal process analogous to a trial in the criminal-justice system, where the
outcomes are respected because the process is considered impartial—or we can see it, instead, for what it really is:
a quasi-legal but ultimately political, and perhaps moral, exercise.

Additionally, the fear that impeachment may weary voters and cause a backlash that might ultimately help Trump
does not seem to be terribly well founded. Two months ago, before the release of the Barr letter, before the release
of the Mueller report, and before triumphant hoots of vindication on the collusion charge from the President and
his allies, Trump’s average approval rating in polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight was at just over forty-two per
cent. It is now at forty-one per cent. If it was true that constant coverage of Democratic investigations and claims
of exoneration from the President would bolster his standing in an impeachment process, one might expect those
things to have boosted his numbers somewhat already. They have not.
Politics aside, there is also for Democrats the possibly naïve and certainly quaint question of whether impeaching
Trump—a President potentially implicated in obstruction of justice by a special counsel’s investigation, regularly
accused of racism and bigotry, and characterized even by conservatives as unfit for the Presidency in various other
ways—is the right thing to do, and if it’s worthwhile, even if it seems politically unpopular. That’s a question that
historians of our political moment and the generations ahead are sure to take an interest in, even if the Democratic
Party does not.
 Radiation levels
Radiation surrounds us. Detectable amounts occur naturally in soil, rocks, water, air, and vegetation but large
dosages can have dramatic and life changing effects. There are different kinds of radiation but it is ionising
radiation that can cause damage to living tissue at high levels making it vital to control our exposure to it.
Radiation exposure depends on three factors, the:
 strength of the radiation source
 distance you are from it
 duration of the exposure
Exposure to high levels of ionising radiation can result in mutation, radiation sickness, cancer, and death but when
used in medical applications it can be used to prolong life. Ionizing radiation is invisible and not directly detectable
by human senses, unless at very high doses, so instruments such as Geiger counters are necessary to detect its
presence.

Measurement
One way to measure radiation is to measure the dose of radiation received, i.e. the effect it has on human tissue,
which is measured in sieverts, abbreviated as Sv.
As 1 sievert represents a very large dose the following smaller units are commonly used;
 Millisieverts, one thousandth of a sievert and abbreviated as mSv (1000mSv = 1Sv)
Or
 Microsieverts, one millionth of a sievert and abbreviated as uSv (1,000,000uSv = 1Sv)
Dosimeters generally measure in microsieverts.
An older unit for dose is the rem (Roentgen Equivalent in Man), or the smaller millirem (abbreviated “mrem”) still
often used in the United States. One sievert is equal to 100rem.
Roentgen’s are another measure, 1 Roentgen (R) equals 0.877 rem or 0.00877 Sieverts.
Geiger counters
Geiger counters are used to detect ionizing radiation. The primary component of the Geiger counter is a tube filled
with a gas that conducts electricity when struck by radiation. This allows the gas to complete an electrical circuit.
This typically includes moving a needle and making an audible sound. Geiger counters can measure radiation in a
variety of units, depending on the application.

Radiation exposure
It can be hard to predict the impact of radiation on humans but around half of all those exposed to 5 sieverts will die
from it. Almost all who receive a dose of 10 sieverts will die within weeks.
A typical dose for those workers who died within one month of the disasters was 6 sieverts.
During the Chernobyl disaster four hundred times more radioactive material was released than at the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima.
The global average exposure of humans to ionizing radiation is about 2.4 – 3mSv (0.0024-0.003Sv) per year, 80%
of which comes from nature. The remaining 20% results from exposure to human-made radiation sources, for
example medical imaging (X-rays, CT scans etc).
In Europe, average natural background exposure by country ranges from under 2mSv annually in the United
Kingdom to more than 7mSv annually in Finland.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires that its licensees limit human-made radiation exposure
for individual members of the public to 1mSv per year, and limit occupational radiation exposure to adults working
with radioactive material to 50mSv per year (3-25 uSv/hr).

Levels of radiation at Chernobyl

Immediately after the explosion
The radiation levels in the worst-hit areas of the reactor building, including the control room, have been estimated
at 300Sv/hr, (300,000mSv/hr) providing a fatal dose in just over a minute.
The reactor staff struggled to establish the levels of radiation following the explosion as one dosimeter capable of
measuring up to 9Sv per second 1,000 R/s was buried in the wreckage, and another one failed when it was turned
on. All the remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s (0.3 µA/kg) 30mSv/hr and read “off scale”. The reactor
staff could therefore only ascertain that the radiation levels were somewhere above 30mSv/h while in reality the
true levels were far higher.
Because of the inaccurate low readings, the reactor crew chief Alexander Akimov assumed that the reactor was
intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building where ignored, and the readings
of another dosimeter brought in at 04:30am were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have
been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, sending members of his crew to
try to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most, including Akimov, died from
radiation exposure within three weeks.
22 years after the explosion radiation levels inside the reactor hall were approximately 34 Sv/hr – a lethal dose in
10-20 minutes.
Fire fighters
Shortly after the explosion firefighters arrived to tackle the fire. First on the scene was the Chernobyl Power Station
firefighter brigade under the command of Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravik, who died on 9 May 1986 of acute
radiation sickness. They were not told how dangerously radioactive the smoke and the debris were, and may not
even have known that the accident was anything more than a regular fire:
“We didn’t know it was the reactor. No one had told us.”
Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire engines, later described what happened:
“We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning…. We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: “Is
that graphite?” I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. “It’s hot,” he said. The
pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big, some small, enough to pick them up…”
“We didn’t know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the
trucks. Misha filled a cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof –
Vashchik, Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik…. They went up the ladder … and I never saw them again.”
However, Anatoli Zakharov, a fireman stationed in Chernobyl since 1980, offers a different description:
I remember joking to the others, “There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We’ll be lucky if we’re all
still alive in the morning.”
Twenty years after the disaster, he said the firefighters from the Fire Station No. 2 were aware of the risks.
Of course we knew! If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral
obligation – our duty. We were like kamikaze
Risk
Generally the levels of radiation in Pripyat and the surrounding area, although far higher than the norm, are safe for
the time you will be exposed to them (just don’t go licking stuff).
Those who work within the zone typically work 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off. The “off” period must be spent outside of
the zone.
Radiation levels can change daily, dependent upon a number of factors including wind speeds. Just because you
measured a level yesterday doesn’t mean it’ll be the same today as pockets of radiation move around. Large
variations in levels can also occur within only a few metres of each other.
Weather cleansed tarmac, or hard standing, is preferable to standing on vegetation. Pay specific attention to moss,
wherever it may grow, as it is great at absorbing radiation and therefore likely to emit far higher levels than the
surface it is growing on. This sounds simple in theory but I found it easy to forget when confronted with the sights
of Pripyat.
It depends on the nature of your visit but for longer, less chaperoned, trips it may be worth borrowing or buying a
Geiger counter. I didn’t have one but many of those I went with did. All gave slightly different readings but
functioned as a good guide. Clearly it’s pointless having one if you don’t know what the readings actually mean,
accurate or not, partly why I didn’t take one on my first visit.
Dust is a potentially nasty. Ingesting radioactive particles is not something you want to make a habit of. I choose
not to wear a mask. The majority of people I saw also didn’t but obviously make your own decision, it’s your
health.
Rooms open to the elements, the majority now are, tend to have lower levels of radiation than those still enclosed
by doors and windows. The basement of the hospital contains the clothing of those who first tackled the explosion.
Located in an enclosed environment even after 25 years the clothing is highly radioactive (way in excess of 386
uSv/h) and a terrifying reminder of what those first on the scene faced. If you do venture down there I recommend
you don’t hang around and wear at least a correctly rated mask that covers both nose and mouth. A hazmat suit you
can bin afterwards may also be wise. I didn’t have a mask and therefore chose not to go down there, a decision I
don’t regret.
High levels or radiation (336 uSv/h) can also be found towards the rear of the claw used in the clean up.
Although decontaminated they clearly missed a bit.
Most of Pripyat was decontaminated in the weeks following the explosion however the graveyard is one exception
(14-22 uSv/h), it being hard to remove topsoil and keep graves intact, and therefore we spent only 15 minutes on
site.
I ate and drank in Pripyat but generally only within the minibus and I was conscious not to touch the food directly
with my hands. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that all accompanying officials must light a
cigarette upon exiting a vehicle in the Zone.
The clothing I wore, including footwear, I either binned or double washed on my return home. It’s easy to become
blasé out there but if you’re unpacking footwear caked in zone mud at home it soon focuses the mind. The clothing
I took home I wrapped and sealed in several bin bags.

The spread of radiation

Following the explosion approximately 100,000 km² of land was significantly contaminated with fallout, the worst
hit regions being in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Lower levels of contamination were detected over all of Europe.
The initial evidence that a major release of radioactive material was affecting other countries came from Sweden,
where on the morning of 28 April workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant approximately 1,100 km (680 mi)
from the Chernobyl were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes.
The rise in radiation levels had already been measured in Finland, but a civil service strike delayed the response and
publication.
It was Sweden’s search for the source of radioactivity, once they had ruled out a leak at the Swedish plant itself,
that at noon on 28 April led to the first hint of a serious nuclear problem in the western Soviet Union. The
evacuation of Pripyat having already taken place by this point.
Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident was scattered depending on the weather conditions. Much was
deposited on mountainous regions such as the Alps and the Welsh and the Scottish Highlands, through rainfall.
Sweden and Norway also received heavy levels of fallout.
Rain was purposely seeded over 10,000 km2 of the Belorussian SSR by the Soviet air force to remove radioactive
particles from clouds heading toward highly populated areas. Heavy, black-coloured, rain fell on the city of Gomel
just over the Belarus border.
Reports from Soviet and Western scientists indicate that Belarus received about 60% of the contamination that fell
on the former Soviet Union. However, the 2006 TORCH report stated that half of the volatile particles had landed
outside Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Studies carried out in surrounding countries indicate that over one million
people could have been affected by radiation.

The release of radiation

The nature of the radiation released was dependent on the physical and chemical properties of the radioactive
elements in the core. Particularly dangerous were the highly radioactive fission products, those with high nuclear
decay rates that accumulate in the food chain, such as the isotopes of iodine, caesium and strontium. Iodine-131 and
caesium-137 are responsible for most of the radiation exposure received by people.
The release of radioisotopes from the nuclear fuel was partly dependent on their boiling points, and the majority of
the radioactivity present in the core was actually retained in the reactor.
 All of the noble gases, including krypton and xenon, contained within the reactor were released immediately
into the atmosphere by the first steam explosion.
 50 to 60% of all core radio-iodine in the reactor was released, as a mixture of vapor, solid particles, and
organic iodine compounds with a half-life of 8 days.
 20 to 40% of all core caesium-137 was released in aerosol form. Caesium-137, along with isotopes of
strontium, are the two primary elements preventing the Chernobyl exclusion zone from being re-inhabited.
Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years.
 An estimated 1150 PBq of Tellurium-132, half-life 78 hours, and 5200 PBq of Xenon-133, half-life 5 days,
was released.
 An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was an emission of 6 t of
fragmented fuel.
Cesium-137
Cesium-137 is a radioactive isotope of caesium which is formed by the nuclear fission of uranium-235 and other
fissionable isotopes in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. It is among the most problematic of the short-to-
medium-lifetime fission products because it easily moves and spreads in nature due to the high water solubility of
caesium’s most common chemical compounds, which are salts.
Cesium-137 has a half-life of approximately 30 years. As of 2005, caesium-137 is the main source of radiation in
the Exclusion Zone around the nuclear power plant. Together with caesium-134, iodine-131, and strontium-90,
caesium-137 was among the isotopes distributed by the reactor explosion that posed the greatest risk to health. It is
Cesium-137 that has led some reindeer and sheep in Scandinavia to exceed the Norwegian safety limit 26 years
after the disaster.
In April 2011, elevated levels of caesium-137 were also being found in the environment after the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear disasters in Japan. Caesium-137 in the environment is human-made. Unlike most other
radioisotopes, caesium-137 is not produced from the same element’s nonradioactive isotopes but as a byproduct of
the nuclear fission of much heavier elements, meaning that until the building of the first artificial nuclear reactor,
the Chicago Pile-1, in late 1942, it had not occurred on Earth for billions of years.

Health of plant workers and local people

In the aftermath of the accident, 237 people suffered from acute radiation sickness (ARS), of whom according to
World Health Organization’s 2006 report, 28 died within the first three months. Most of the victims were the
firemen and rescue workers first on the scene.
No further ARS-related deaths were identified in the general population affected by the disaster. Of the 72,000
Russian Emergency Workers being studied, 216 non-cancer deaths are attributed to the disaster, between 1991 and
1998. Of all the 66,000 Belarusian emergency workers, by the mid-1990s only 150 (roughly 0.2%) were reported
by their government as having died. In contrast, 5,722 casualties were reported among Ukrainian clean-up workers
up to the year 1995, by the National Committee for Radiation Protection of the Ukrainian Population.
The latency period for solid cancers caused by excess radiation exposure can be 10 or more years; so at the time of
the WHO report being undertaken, the rates of solid cancer deaths were no greater than the general population.
Acute radiation syndrome
Acute radiation syndrome (ARS), also known as radiation poisoning, radiation sickness or radiation toxicity, is a
number of health effects which occur within 24 hours of exposure to high amounts of ionising radiation.
The radiation causes cellular degradation due to destruction of cell walls and other key molecular structures within
the body and it is this destruction that causes the symptoms. The symptoms can begin within one or two hours and
may last for several months. The term refers to acute medical problems rather than ones that develop after a
prolonged period.
The onset and type of symptoms depends on the radiation exposure. Relatively smaller doses result in
gastrointestinal effects such as nausea and vomiting and symptoms related to falling blood counts such as infection
and bleeding. Relatively larger doses can result in neurological effects and rapid death. Treatment of acute radiation
syndrome is generally supportive with blood transfusions and antibiotics, with some more exotic treatments such as
bone marrow transfusions being required in extreme cases.
Similar symptoms may appear months to years after exposure as chronic radiation syndrome when the dose rate is
too low to cause the acute form. Radiation exposure can also increase the probability of developing some other
diseases, mainly different types of cancers. These diseases are sometimes referred to as radiation sickness, but they
are never included in the term acute radiation syndrome