Why We Must Impeach

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

With a single telephone call, Donald Trump betrayed the presidency in ways almost unimaginable until that moment. During the call, he attempted to pressure a foreign leader to help him smear and destroy both a chief political opponent and that opponent’s political party to benefit himself in a presidential election. This offense differs from all his other transgressions, venal corruptions, and daily degradations of the office. It is an attack on the foundations of our republic, turning diplomacy into a weapon of personal and partisan political power. The nation’s founders understood, having fought a revolution against monarchy, that no government of the people was invulnerable to such egregious abuses of power. They were particularly concerned, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, that a president, through “cabal, intrigue, and corruption,” might help “foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” In their wisdom, they created a mechanism to halt this disloyal corruption in its tracks: impeachment.

Impeachment is a severe measure of last resort, which ought to be used only in the most extreme cases. In the United States, the voters are supposed to decide who governs. That’s what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind when they formed a new government in which, at every level, ultimate sovereignty lay in “We, the People.” Elections legitimately won cannot be illegitimately undone at the whim of a faction or party. They should only be undone by throwing the bum out at the next election.

What happens, though, if a president uses the powers of office to disrupt the next election? What if that president does so by brazenly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power? Or if he does so by trying in secret to extort cooperation from a foreign ally threatened by that same hostile power? What if the president has denied the existence of an ongoing systematic cyberattack from the hostile power, which every U.S. intelligence service calls a clear and present threat to our democracy? What if the actions of that president raise urgent questions about the legitimacy of the next election and cast a darker cloud over how he gained the office in the first place?

There have been earlier impeachments and interferences with democratic institutions in our history, but nothing like this one. In this, as he likes to say, Trump truly stands alone. He has assaulted American democracy, claimed he has the authority to do so, and dared anybody to do anything about it, dismissing with contempt Congress’ clear constitutional authority to oversee and check the executive branch. He thinks he can use the office of the presidency as a personal instrument, along with private emissaries, to desecrate the rule of law and then protect himself from the consequences. He even declares in public that he is the law, claiming that, according to Article II of the Constitution, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Not even the most corrupt and criminal of our previous presidents has tried to pervert our most sacred institutions as openly as Trump has.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/sean-wilentz-why-we-must-impeach-donald-trump-897246/

[dalton99a]

1. Trump's offenses represent the greatest threat to American democracy since the Confederate secession

Here is another of the central dangers of permitting Trump to stay in office. He has shown he will stop at nothing to taint the 2020 election. And more profoundly, he is trying to subvert the American government. Trump and his supporters like to rail against what they call the “deep state” as an un-American force. But that “deep state” is in fact nothing more than the government of the United States of America, which he and his supporters hold in open contempt and which the Trump White House has done its utmost to decimate, replacing responsible officials with flunkies.

Although Nancy Pelosi had long suspected Trump of grave wrongdoing, it took the Ukraine scandal to persuade her to commence an impeachment inquiry. Along with others skeptical of impeachment, she could see clearly how this affair signaled that Trump’s tenure in office was an emergency that needed full investigation. Predictably, Republicans have stood by Trump, in part out of fear of his wrath and even more because they see in him, despite all his vulgarity, a champion of their principles, including a reflexive hostility to government.

It would require at least 20 Republican senators to desert Trump in order to remove him from office. Many observers consider that highly unlikely, to say the least, but the clarity of the evidence mounting against the president — and his contempt for Congress’ power — may make the outcome in the Senate far from a foregone conclusion. Trump’s Republican loyalists are not doing themselves or their party any favors, let alone the nation. They seem oblivious to the glaring fact of Trump’s career: That, perhaps outside of his own family, there is no associate he is not willing to destroy once he decides that his finances, his power, or simply his fragile ego demand it.

At one level, Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party will not end until he has devoured everyone inside it who is not a slavish extension of his own will to power. At another, Trump’s war against the U.S. government, his rage to turn every federal institution into an instrument of his own self-aggrandizement, aims to void government of any other purpose. This is precisely what the Ukraine scandal reveals. And it leaves Congress with no alternative but to impeach and remove him.

Trump’s offenses represent the greatest threat to American democracy since the Confederate secession in 1860-61. The time is fast approaching for all Americans to decide which side they are on: the United States of America or Donald J. Trump.

[Stuart G]

2. K and R..Thank You for posting..