Yeah yeah. I really don’t think this is about being the bigger man or something noble like that. I think making impeachment political is literally a death spiral.
Why the Democrats would be insane to impeach Trump http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/11/why-democrats-would-be-insane-to-impeach-donald-trump/ more at the link
If impeachment was only a political tool used to win elections, then yes that would make sense. I don't believe that impeachment should be based on whether or not impeaching the President will help the opposite party win or lose an election. It should be based upon whether or not the President committed impeachable offenses that deserve action.
The political calculus for impeaching Trump ... Will the Democrats win more Congressional seats and the Presidency in 2020 if Trump is in office but seriously damaged by the Mueller Report (and potentially indict-able once he is no longer President) or Trump removed from office (House votes to impeach and the Senate votes to remove) My bet is the former. If enough Senate Republicans demand it, the House will impeach, for they will not be able to help themselves. The Senate Republicans may do this if they fear Trump will take them down in the 2020 election.
Yeah, if the case your arguing is impeachment for paying hush money to p*rn stars and strippers. Imo, not only would it be political suicide, it'd actually be a miscarriage of justice to call that a high crime. It's a different situation though if we're later talking about conspiracy, obstruction, corruption, money laundering, emoluments, or something like that. In that light, I think the message is that the Democrats would be insane to impeach Trump right now. In any case, in the forward-looking hypothetical, it might still be politically irrational to impeach him. If the Senate won't convict anyway. If it creates a groundswell of ill-feeling in the electorate. If it clears the way for a stronger Republican candidate. But if the House has solid evidence of a real high crime, I want them to do it anyway even if they must sacrifice their own political careers and the political peace of the country to do it. We should not tolerate criminals in office, period. Any argument to the contrary will sound to me like a rationalization to do the wrong thing.
One thing... we may need to redefine crimes, especially felonies. Since according to the filing papers just submitted, trump has committed felony crimes. If we are to ignore that, we may need to say its now legal to direct someone to bribe someone to not disclose an affair in order to hide that information from voters and to avoid losing the campaign. I am sure many current and future candidates for political office will appreciate the decriminalization of campaign abuses like that.
the folks at Lawfare arguing Trump's transgressions are impeachable: "It is not a simple case. But ultimately, we believe the conduct at issue would be impeachable." https://www.lawfareblog.com/does-trumps-involvement-cohen-payments-constitute-impeachable-offense
NY Times columnist argues impeachment is "inevitable." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage The Inevitability of Impeachment Even Republicans may be deciding that the president has become too great a burden to their party or too great a danger to the country. By Elizabeth Drew Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate. Dec. 27, 2018 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 midterms were followed by new revelations in criminal investigations of once-close advisers as well as new scandals involving Mr. Trump himself. The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part — perhaps affecting his foreign policy — grew stronger. Then the events of the past several days — the president’s precipitous decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s abrupt resignation, the swoon in the stock market, the pointless shutdown of parts of the government — instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans. 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. I don’t share the conventional view that if Mr. Trump is impeached by the House, the Republican-dominated Senate would never muster the necessary 67 votes to convict him. Stasis would decree that would be the case, but the current situation, already shifting, will have been left far behind by the time the senators face that question. Republicans who were once Mr. Trump’s firm allies have already openly criticizedsome of his recent actions, including his support of Saudi Arabia despite the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and his decision on Syria. They also openly deplored Mr. Mattis’s departure. 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 would agree, the "frivolous" impeachment of Trump is as inevitable as his acquittal and subsequent re-election because Democrats simply can't control themselves.
Not quite as inevitable as people jumping the gun about how "frivolous" things are before there has been a report issued.
The reason I used that word is because the author of the quoted article called impeaching Clinton for obstruction of justice and purjury "frivolous". If that's the standard then pretty much any impeachment would be "frivolous"
I don't think there will be any effort to impeach Trump until Mueller's report comes out. You can't impeach someone for just being incompetent to lead or being a wacko apparently. Trump removing forces from Syria in the manner he did makes him ill fit to be commander in chief, but until law enforcement branch produces a strong case that he has indeed committed high crimes or misdemeanors, the process should not begin.
Pelosi concurs. For Pelosi to hard charge an impeachment vote before Mueller is done is Republican wish fulfillment. I posit that Pelosi only allows an impeachment vote if the Republican Senators publicly beg for it. And even then I am not 100% sure if Pelosi would acquiesce. Trump would in effect be Pelosi’s puppet, for the remainder of his term and criminally tried in federal courts once he leaves.
fanning the flames of impeachment https://arcdigital.media/trump-should-be-impeached-but-not-yet-272c5c243a40
Nancy says No to impeachment https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hes-just-not-worth-it/?utm_term=.30c71b300048
Elections have consequences. No Senate. No impeach. The Fix seems to imply that she wouldn't have pursued it anyways. Probably true, but it lessens the hardcore impeachment crowd knowing Dems don't have full control.
