He’s blowing up their very restrictive class distinctions. He’s blowing up the way they talk about things inside the Beltway. He’s blowing up diplomacy. He’s blowing up foreign relations. And it’s being done in a way these people can’t figure out. For the life of them, they can’t understand straight talk. To them, straight talk is thuggery, it’s insulting, and it’s mysterious. And so Trump is like an invader, an alien, and he’s gotta go. – Rush Limbaugh, “The Rush Limbaugh Radio Program”, 7/19/18
Elizabeth Drew is a “political journalist” who for many years covered Washington for The New Yorker and is the author of “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.”
Yesterday, The New York Times posted an article written by her titled “The Inevitability of Impeachment”. As we say down in Dixie, “Ya’ll ain’t gonna believe this ****”
An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events.
Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will learn what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has found, even if his investigation is cut short.
A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill.
…The word “impeachment” has been thrown around with abandon. The frivolous impeachment of President Bill Clinton helped to define it as a form of political revenge. But it is far more important and serious than that: It has a critical role in the functioning of our democracy.
Impeachment was the founders’ method of holding a president accountable between elections. Determined to avoid setting up a king in all but name, they put the decision about whether a president should be allowed to continue to serve in the hands of the representatives of the people who elected him.
The founders understood that overturning the results of a presidential election must be approached with care and that they needed to prevent the use of that power as a partisan exercise or by a faction. So they wrote into the Constitution provisions to make it extremely difficult for Congress to remove a president from office, including that after an impeachment vote in the House, the Senate would hold a trial, with a two-thirds vote needed for conviction.
Lost in all the discussion about possible lawbreaking by Mr. Trump is the fact that impeachment wasn’t intended only for crimes. For example, in 1974 the House Judiciary Committee charged Richard Nixon with, among other things, abusing power by using the I.R.S. against his political enemies. The committee also held the president accountable for misdeeds by his aides and for failing to honor the oath of office’s pledge that a president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The current presidential crisis seems to have only two possible outcomes. If Mr. Trump sees criminal charges coming at him and members of his family, he may feel trapped. This would leave him the choice of resigning or trying to fight congressional removal. But the latter is highly risky.
It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived. In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival. Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.
But it may well not come to a vote in the Senate. Facing an assortment of unpalatable possibilities, including being indicted after he leaves office, Mr. Trump will be looking for a way out. It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed. Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection.
Mr. Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, and despite suspicions, no evidence has ever surfaced that the fix was in. While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.
I wonder if Ms. Drew has ever thought about writing Harlequin Romance Novels?
She certainly has a flair for fiction.
So, the Democrats and the Vichy Republicans are going to miraculously come together and impeach President Donald J. Trump.
Really? Over what, exactly?
The fact that he misspoke in Helsinki? Big hairy deal.
“But…but…RUSSIAN COLLUSION!!!”
Prove it. Mueller hasn’t.
The fact that he tweets too much?
He is bypassing the Main Stream Media, just like Ronald Reagan did.
The fact that he has shut down to government in order to get the funds to place a wall on our Southern Border?
The majority of Americans want him to.
Or, is it because he is not allowing thousands of illegal aliens (future Democratic Voters) to invade our country in “caravans”?
They should have come here legally.
The fact that he is stopping Obamacare?
It was failing before he won the 2016 Presidential Election.
Perhaps you would like to impeach President Trump over the fact that he supports our Armed Forces and he wants them to be better equipped than our enemies?
And, in turn, they love him, as demonstrated during his and Melania’s trip to visit them in Iraq at Christmas?
During the Obama Administration, our Brightest and Best were used as guinea pigs in social experimentation for your political causes.
Perhaps you Democrats are upset because his Foreign Policy of America First is working so well that he is bringing home our troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
I thought you guys were anti-war?
Perhaps you’re upset that we have such a gracious, classy First Lady who speaks 6 languages and who represents her husband and our nation so well at home and abroad?
In the cellphone sales business, that’s called an “UPGRADE”.