Like blowjobs?
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Indeed. The criteria is surprisingly flexible depending on whether or not Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House.
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Those memorials were not built to remind us of the war. They were built to remind black people where their place is. They should be destroyed.
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German here. Now, we didn’t get to build celebratory statues about the valiant Wehrmacht soldiers and generals who fought all over Europe. For some weird reason the allies didn’t let us. They even made us take some stuff down.
What we did build, decades later, were monuments about the victims and all to few survivors of Naxi terror. Like that field of stones in Berlin. Or the very depressing “burned down Synagoge” installation made out of black rock in my hometown. Which prompted my 5 year old to ask what it was about and me to try to explain it, as a warning that decent people can’t stand by when bad people try to persecute others.
That seems to work reasonably well.
I don’t see how this would work with a statue of Emperor William on horseback.
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Apologies to those who are sick of this song, but it is rather relevant:
Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future
The battle for the past is for the future
Must be the winners of the memory war
Smash reach out and then grab the flower
At the end of the day their defeat will be for sure
Have you inside your memory the scene of the crime
If you don’t have a clue then you’re running out a time
Struggle continues while di sun shine
Past and the truth two of them you have to combine
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won’t know about it for fifty years or more
Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day
The history they teach is the voice of the victor
You need to look again you need to have a propaganda!
If truth is your price then come join the bounty hunters
Because truth make you the enemy of all these liars
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won’t know about it for fifty years or more
Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future
Soon come judgement day
Must be the winners of the memory war
Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day
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The linked to article in the OP discusses that amendments should be taken to limit the powers of the Constitution prior to the amendment and as such the fifth amendment is very much a limit on the pardon power. He does say however that this had never been tested in court.
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We’re going to need to give him more rope.
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Technically the President can be impeached for anything or nothing. Basically it’s just a no-confidence vote from both houses of the Congress, a simple majority in the House and a 2/3rds majority in the Senate. For this reason the only two presidents to ever be convicted by the House (Johnson and Clinton) have been acquitted by the Senate. It’s next to impossible for the POTUS to actually be impeached and would require doing something so unacceptable to the American people that a significant number of Senators in his or her own party wouldn’t regard a vote for impeachment to be political suicide. (Then again, we are talking about Trump. Impossible ain’t what it used to be.)
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I wasn’t exaggerating about Arpaio ruining more lives than a Category 4 hurricane, both undocumented immigrants and American citizens.
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Yes.
This is not a tolerable or sustainable situation. Lives are being destroyed.
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Wow, I’m even starting to miss George Bush now.
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That is correct. Here is the SPLC’s analysis of when these monuments were built. The vast bulk were installed 40 years after the end of the war during Jim Crow, with another burst during the civil rights era (same time the confederate battle flag was brought out from obscurity):
I think they should be melted down and turned into liberation monuments, of which there are basically zero in the US. Here are some from other countries:
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Point of extreme pedantry, but I believe the procedure in the House is more akin to indictment than trial: that is, they decide whether there is a case to answer.
I believe “high crimes and misdemeanours” was originally a term of art going back to mediaeval England that meant something like malfeasance in public office. But like you say, it’s essentially a political action more than anything else, though I get the impression it still carries an implication of moral condemnation that, say, British votes of no confidence in the government don’t. This may actually limit its usefulness as a means of disposing of a president, as some of those on the right who think Trump is useless or dangerous may balk at describing his actions as crimes.
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My language wasn’t legally precise, but I think you’re right.
Solid point. But I don’t think there’s a legal standard by which, for example, the SCOTUS could throw out a successful impeachment of a POTUS (unlikely though the latter is in the first place). I may be wrong about that.
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I wouldn’t count on it, but there’s still a chance of a last-minute impeachment from the RNC-GOP.
If it happens, the next question is: who do the uniforms obey?
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Nor do I. My point was more that a Republican Congresscritter may be more likely to vote for a motion that essentially says “he’s basically a good guy, and we gave him a shot, but he’s not really up to the job” than one that says “the guy’s a criminal”.
(One of my history lecturers, a rather colourful Irishman, argued that the wording of the Constitution – “the President shall be removed from Office on Impeachment”, emphasis added – meant that the framers envisaged impeachment as a fairly routine procedure. But I don’t think his opinion is mainstream. )
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However, we still have a LOT - like, in nearly every village - of monuments for the soldiers of The Great War, aka Weltkrieg Numero 1, or Le Guerre de Quatorze-Dix-huite.We have Bundeswehr-Kasernen (barracks sounds just wrong there…) named after Wehrmacht generals, and only this year our DoD ordered a review of this and internal policies regarding the Wehrmacht in the Bundeswehr culture. Also, nobody had an issue with the Olympiastadion in Berlin being very prominently used during the 2006 World Cup, and architecturally speaking sure that without allied bombings a lot of landmarks erected by our grandparents would still define German cities.
The story of taking down Nazi and DDR monuments, however, is an interesting one. And I fully agree with you that monuments like the one you described marking the place of former synagogues are a very important reminder why human rights matter and the first article of our constitution is “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.”
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