Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Impeachment Won’t Solve Everything

There’s a good piece by Jeet Heer in The New Republic about the Democrats’ dangerous obsession with impeaching Trump.

The practical problem is that for impeachment to be meaningful, Trump would not just have to be impeached by the House of Representatives (which requires a simple majority) but also removed by the Senate (requiring a two-thirds vote). It’s easy to imagine a scenario where the Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018 and have the necessary votes for impeachment. But even in that best-case scenario, in which Democrats win every toss-up race for the Senate, they would still be well short of the votes they need in the Senate. Which means that kicking Trump out of the White House by necessity has to be a bipartisan effort with significant Republican buy-in.

[…]

The Republican Party has proven that they will tolerate just about anything from Trump. They continue to stand with him despite his demented tweeting, the political support he’s given to Roy Moore, his repeated expressions of contempt for the justice system, and his cavalier threats to launch a nuclear war. Unless Robert Mueller finds the possibly apocryphal “pee tape,” Republicans are likely to remain loyal to Trump. In fact, there’s a real possibility that even if the “pee tape” is real and widely viewed, Trump would still remain politically sacrosanct among his own party.

The most promising route for stopping Trump, then, is through the ballot box. Democrats need a convincing platform and effective organization to win elections at every level. If the party can win back Congress in 2018, it can immediately start hamstringing Trump’s presidency without resorting to the unlikely path of impeachment. Democrats can launch investigations into Trump’s many improper acts. They can stall his nominees, especially in the courts. They can also start laying down rules for reining in the imperial presidency, including the thermonuclear monarchy, so that no future commander-in-chief has the dangerous power Trump possesses.

Impeachment is hard to do and it’s a political act as opposed to a judicial function.  In my lifetime it’s been put in motion when the opposition party has held the majority in Congress, and that’s how it will play out.

The only way to truly rid the nation of the Trump effect is to vote him and every Republican who supports him and his policies out of office the next time around, which is eleven months from now in the midterms, and then come up with both a viable and impervious candidate in 2020 who can not just be the anti-Trump but someone with a vision that brings us back to reality.

3 barks and woofs on “Impeachment Won’t Solve Everything

  1. I wouldn’t buy into his argument totally. We’ve not seen his actual medical records and after that Asian trip I noticed when he got off the plane he looked tired and seemed as though he was huffing a bit. He could be his own worst enemy and just die.

    • Or someone could slip a poison pill into his Pepsi. Believe me, this country is getting more and more like czarist Russia or ancient Syria and plots abound. I wish. (wicked chortle). . .

  2. After the tax scam is signed the GOP no longer needs the odious idiot. By framing the Dems with impeachment they get rid of the 2018 dead fish smell and smear the Dems at the same time.

Comments are closed.