So many people arguing against impeachment show they have no idea what it means.
Impeachment is the trial. Removal is the sentencing. So, no, it’s not a waste of time for the House to do something just because Mitchy won’t let the Senate vote to remove. No, it won’t guarantee President Pence any more than the impeachment of Bill Clinton gave us President Gore. But it does send a signal that this behaviour is un-fucking-acceptable. Doing nothing says “realistically, we’re okay with it”. Doing nothing means that he can run in 2020 on a platform of being entirely exonerated “and even the Dems know it or they would’ve impeached me, amiright?”
McConnel is running in 2020 same as trump. Its not about McConnell, but about the opportunity to burden him with ignoring blatent wrong doing.
You describe a sloppy mess where the GOP beats the pants off the Dems. No doubt that is possible, but I’d like to think the Dems could rise to the occasion as they did during the Kavanaugh hearings and give the nation pause over the GOP shenanigans.
We can not give trump a pass and let him run again with the plan to beat him then. Its like saying he is right - he is exonerated. They have to move to impeach him even knowing, and in fact acknowledging that it is futile BECAUSE of GOP corruption. Predict it strongly, and watch it play out just as corrupt and crooked as you said it would.
But if you don’t impeach him, you’ve set the standard that trump can get away with this shit, he will shake it all off in the campaign, and he’ll stoop lower in his next term.
Which is what makes it likely to be challenged. Constitutional crises arise when there is no clear constitutional direction on something that is within the purview of constitutional law.
The constitution directly addresses how to deal with a president who has committed crimes or abuses of power. But it does not mention indictments, grand juries, or law enforcement of any kind in reference to that. Just congress’ role and impeachment.
That’s might be because only Congress is supposed to have the power to police this issue. That might be because they simply assumed it was obvious a president could be indicted, and thought it unnecessary to lay out in the constitution.
So we attempt to interpret it from other bits of the constitution and our government structure. From what I recall the can’t position is mostly based on the inability of the executive to conflict with congresses role in checking the executive. The fact that the constitution specifies impeachment as the only way to remove an able bodied president from office. But doesn’t address the obvious problem of a president who has been convicted of a crime but is still in office.
This situation is one of the classic examples of a potential constitutional crisis.
You can nuh-uh if you want. But all consensus means is “most people agree”.
For one thing it isn’t just the DOJ that operates under this assumption. The White House itself does, Congress, every state, and every law enforcement body in the US takes this position.
And it’s not as if this position is drawn from the DOJ rule either. The argument predates the rule, and the rule was based on a shit load of back and forth on the subject. We hashed this all out pretty hard during Watergate. And the rule is a response to that debate, it’s why Nixon was listed as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Watergate indictments instead of charged directly. There’s been a ton of academic and expert writing on the subject. Most of it comes down on the can’t side. And even those that argue it is possible to indict or charge a sitting president start from the assumption that can’t is the status quo. High school history textbooks lay out the can’t interpretation.
That’s pretty classic “consensus”.
There’s a very big difference between a discussion about whether you should be able to indict a president, and a legal argument over whether you can.
Potential abuse of the system is a “should” question. But not a particularly common or weighty one, especially given that impeachment is already a deliberately political process. On that end arguments against are more often drawn from the unholy mess of unanswered questions it would create. Many of them also potential constitutional crises. What do you do about a president who has been convicted of a crime, and maybe even imprisoned, but who remains in office? If you have the power to indict, do you have the power to try the charges and convict. Who has the power to indict, who tries the offense? What about the inherent conflict of the executive policing itself?
Impeachment is the total process, as well as the term for the House’s part of it. The trial is the trial. And takes place in the Senate. The house gets to investigate, and initiate the process. A president is “impeached” when the house passes articles of impeachment and passes them to the senate, before the trial takes place.
Removal from office is the automatic result of conviction.
Will it? Or will his eventual acquittal simply validate his actions. And bolster his argument that he’s done nothing wrong and he’s legally allowed to do whatever he wants?
You’re talking about a guy who’s still crowing about how the Mueller report is a total vindication.
His base don’t view that as a burden. It’s good that he’s violated god knows how many norms and rules to protect their guy.
For impeachment to gain any sort of purchase, including the sort where it makes people like McConnell look bad, you kind of need the other side to acknowledge these are bad things.
It’s a little hard to smear republicans with stuff their voters view as positives. You still need the ground to shift in order for this to be feasible. None the less a smart move. Investigating and getting things discovered during said investigations in front of the public is the method the House has to cause that. And its what they’re doing now. And its a necessary precursor to impeachment, their specific role in this sort of thing.
It’s an operational guideline unlikely to be tested in a court of law because nobody in the DOJ is about to violate standing policy by indicting a sitting President, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to characterize that as “consensus academic position in Constitutional law.”
Academics usually just don’t spend much time arguing about the legality of something that is all but guaranteed never to happen.
That’s the status quo. The only way to shift it is to go to impeachment proceedings. Ignore it, and he really does get away with it.
Even with Impeachment, but not conviction, he’s tarnished forever. Remember that insecure Donny just wants to be liked. He can’t stand criticism. It will definitely have a huge impact on him to be impeached, regardless of conviction or removal.
Conveniently there was this thing called Watergate where it was eminently possible this was going to happen that spurred a lot of analysis of the subject. And its really only been since then that it was all but guaranteed to never happen. Like I said the guideline post dates the analysis, and is drawn from it.
This very much seems to be a thing in legal circle. I’ve got friends who while in law school had assignments to prep arguments for and against as part of constitutional law classes. Including one who went through all that just a couple months ago.
So we need to barrel into impeachment without the necessary ground work for pursuing impeachment?
And that will some how prevent Trump from getting away with it, and politicizing the results?
My whole point is that if you want Trump to get removed from office, or even just get tarnished forever you need to do it right. And kicking off impeachment right now, as the ground stands, is not the right way to do it. It pays to do things like get the unredacted Mueller report, subpoena Trump’s financial records and get the details in front of the public. There’s a rough pathway for this stuff and it starts with investigations. Fuck the Impeachment process itself includes an investigative phase in the House.
Yeah, that’s my point. It could even force the issue of the tax returns. But don’t underestimate how the stress of being under impeachment will affect Donny. He makes mistakes when under stress.
the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the delay in the report was to give enough time to get assange out of the embassy and into custody. redaction heaven.
One more question: how do you know that the testimony of the people working in the administration was “bullshit” when from your responses to the Special Counsel’s questions, it would appear you have little or no recollection of much of anything?
The president also said “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”
Roy Cohn was disbarred for reasons including lying on a bar form, stealing from a client, and forcing a terminally ill client to sign a will naming Cohn the executor.
Sorry to tell you this, but there is almost zero chance that we will ever know the answers to at least 16 of your 20 questions, and that is partially due to the fact that you are asking them in the wrong way: Your questions that are composed as “When did DT first decide”, or “When did DT first learn”, or “When did DT first become aware of” various things are unanswerable by anyone but Trump, and probably not even answerable by him since he seems to have pretty poor recollection of events and probably an even poorer ability to tie whatever he does remember to specific dates.
Sure, you might be able to change the “first learn” or “first become aware of” questions into the form of “when was he first informed or first made aware of” the event, but you will almost certainly never find out when Trump first decided to do anything because he probably can’t even answer that himself.
Still, it would probably be very entertaining if Trump was ever examined by a prosecutor with exactly those questions, and hear him try to figure out what and how to answer… I can just imagine the steam coming out of his ears and the grinding of the gears in his head as they fail to mesh properly.
How have the last two years not laid that ground work by the mere fact of their existence? This man has been a walking talking example of an impeachable president since the day he took office. This report may not contain a lot of new information, but it plainly lays out everything we’ve gone through since 2015 in clear language, all in one place. This is the ground work for impeachment. There’s no sense trying to convince Republicans and his hoard of supporters of his criminality, but letting him get away with it is literally the worst possible idea. Elections are not the constitutionally-mandated remedy for a criminal president; impeachment is.
Exactly. And that ground work involves investigations and public hearings in the house as well, picking up from what Mueller has found. Not passing articles of impeachment right now. Or right after the midterm, or right after he was elected. Or right at any point where the internets started screaming for it to happen immediately.
It can be clear as day to you and me that he’s unfit for office. But the House needs to be able to prove that in a Senate Trial. A Senate trial that will be conducted in a GOP controlled Senate. And to make that a possibility they need to convince the public. Only 40% of the population supports the idea of an Impeachment, and IIRC the number is lower for people who think Trump should be removed from office. In terms of GOP voters they’re near universally opposed to an impeachment attempt, and the vast majority believe the investigations to be partisan attacks. So GOP senators have no incentive to vote to convict, or even let the process hash out fairly. As it stands they would be punished by their base for doing so.
Then there’s no possibility of successfully removing him from office. And critically there is no possible outcome except Trump getting away with it.
Jumping to impeachment without laying the ground work is letting him off the hook. The impeachment process is not a consequence or a check for his actions if all that results is vindication and opportunity to spin the situation to his own benefit.
Doing so would only appear as partisan as the GOP smear would paint it. And to be honest probably would be a purely partisan action.
The things they’re doing now; investigations, subpoenas, trying to get the full Meuller info out and into the public, are the pathway to impeachment. And especially in the current political environment are the best chance to meaningfully shift public opinion to the point where impeachment is feasible.
More over you’ve got that election coming up. Impact on the outcome from a poorly conceived and improperly run impeachment proceeding aren’t gonna be great. And what not a lot of people seem to be considering is that if Trump does get re-elected, and we’ve already shot our impeachment wad on a push that had no hope of success. Well, were SOL for 4 more years of open criminality.
Impeachment is not mandated. There is nothing in there about congress being required to pursue impeachment where grounds exist. Only that they can. Even if we consider it a moral imperative that doesn’t mean its going to work. This is a political process not a legal one.
We’ll see where this shakes out in the coming weeks. The Mueller report will probably make it hard for the DNC to avoid impeachment down the road (if that’s even what they want to do). It pretty clearly lays out multiple instances of obstruction, and its pretty explicitly addressed at congress, even making reference to their role in applying criminal statues to the president’s actions as part of the explanation for why there weren’t charges. We’ll see what impact it has on public opinion over the next couple weeks. And whether congress can press that further with continued public hearings. Which have already been announced.
You seem to be setting a bar that’s impossibly high.
It’s much, much higher than the Republicans set to start impeachment proceedings against Clinton.
There will never be a scenario where enough Republicans are charismatically seduced by logic and principle to boil their own leader. There will never be a worthwhile approach that is popular with Republican senators.
The point isn’t to wait for some unattainable time when Republicans agree that they’re horrible, and that they agree with the Democrats with tear-filled eyes.
No. The House can put Trump on the defensive over criminality whatever ultimately happens in the Senate. Clinton proved that.
Congress can use its muscle to influence the political discussion of the day, and that’s what the constitution encourages and allows. It doesn’t need to find him guilty on the charge to express their concern, and it’s probably better than waiting, only to passively and defensively react to the next Trumpian scheme, where he dictates the subject of the debate.
A political news-cycle focused on Trump’s criminality is better than a news-cycle focused on a Wall, or a proposed anti-immigrant program, or whatever else is predictably going to pop up as soon as Trump feels unchallenged again.
And look how that worked out. They failed to remove him from office, by the end the bulk of the public saw the attempt for the partisan horse shit it was. And his approval ratings afterwards skyrocketed. He finished his presidency insanely popular. Clinton shouldn’t set the bar. Because Clinton is the big historical example of groundless impeachment pursued for political gain. Which is not a good thing.
I’m not saying that. I pretty explicitly said it’ll happen when public opinion makes their current position risky. When they fear the electoral fallout of continuing to stone wall.
And where did I say wait. I said follow the process. Which is what they’re doing. Even if they were screaming impeachment at every opportunity putting that together would look exactly like what’s happening right now. Provided you wanted the best chance of actual removal from office. Its almost exactly the sequence of actions used in pursuing articles of impeachment against Nixon. And public opinion on Watergate and the Nixon’s actions did not start to shift until public Congressional hearings on the Watergate cover up started. Which followed from criminal investigations and prosecutions.
Something that will be fairly hard to do if they don’t do the base work of finding out about said criminality, and putting it all on firm footing.
I don’t think they’ll have a particularly easy time pushing the new cycle to focus on Trump’s abuses of power though an impeachment that’s easily smeared and dismissed as a partisan attack. Or with a shit show process. That’s likely to turn into a horse race news cycle about how its failing, and endless discussion over whether its motivated by partisan concerns. Which are rather nicely Trump’s take on these things.
The Russian thing and any obstruction isn’t even the sum total of Trump’s criminality. Investigations into his financials, business, emoluments and assorted other corruption have only just started to ramp up.
