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There has been a steadily rising clamor to impeach Donald Trump over a number of issues. A solid majority of Americans now support it.
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What’s
that I smell? It may be the mildew of a soggy Fall in these parts or the dog’s grass pad gone too long uncleaned. But no, I smell impeachment in the morning.
And this time it is serious. Some folks have been muttering and calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump almost from the beginning—and he piled up many
possible offences—violating the emolument clause of the Constitution,
payoffs and bribes to Stormy Daniels and others, possible tax fraud, obstruction of justice in several
instances most notably in trying to interfere with or squash the Mueller Report to name a few.
Wanting
to impeach a President political opponents
don’t like is nothing new—some Republicans were pushing to do it to Barack Obama from practically the first
moment after he completed the Oath of
Office despite a complete lack of
evidence that he committed any impeachable
offences. Of course in those days
leaders of the Congressional lynch mob
were fond of telling Fox News that “An
impeachable offence is anything we say it is.”
We will note a little later in this blog
post a litany of Presidents who faced similar aborted partisan attacks.
The
Cheeto-in-Charge successfully evaded any serious threat first because the Republican controlled House of Representatives would never bring a Bill of Impeachment and then after the Blue Wave election in 2018 brought Democrats into control of the
House because Mitch McConnell and
the Republican Senate would never
vote to convict.
Although
over the spring and summer of this year impeachment resolutions were filed by Congresspersons Brad Sherman of California, Rashida Tlaib of Massachusetts,
Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, and
Al Green also of Texas. But those went directly into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s circular file. Despite a rising chorus demanding impeachment
proceedings from the activist left of
the Democratic Party and restless Congresspersons responding to pressure from
their home Districts, Pelosi and
most of the House leadership urged
caution saying matters would best be left to the next election because impeachment would suck all of the air out of Congress for anything else. Frankly, she feared that impeachment was a trap that would rouse the Trump base to a frenzy.
All
those escapes emboldened the already
narcissistic and megalomaniacal to be ever more reckless confident that his supporters would stand by him even as he once claimed “I could stand in the middle
of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Certainly Evangelicals who had once been prissy
prudes about all sexual matters threw
away all of those scruples to
declare him a saint and a holy man.
White voters uncomfortable and
angry about becoming a minority in “their country” cheered
every veiled or open attack on immigrants,
minorities of all sorts, and their tribal enemies to supposedly sneering
liberal elite. Oligarchs who might cringe at his crudeness and bluster
sang hallelujah and emptied their pockets to a President
delivering their libertarian utopia by
abandoning any and all business, environmental, labor, voting
rights, or civil rights
regulations.
The
Resident now shook off any of a small army of staffers and appointees
who tried to restrain or temper his ever wilder excesses. No one
could stop Trump from being Trump.
That
is until an as yet unknown whistleblower
alarmed at possibly treasonous attempt
to extort a foreign leader into digging
up dirt on his leading Democratic presidential opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
The whistleblower went through proper
channels and the Inspector General
of the Intelligence Community (ICIG)
found the allegations credible only
to have an investigation personally quashed
when the acting Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) refused to forward the report to
Congressional intelligence committees. After that all hell broke loose.
Thanks
to Trump’s own recklessness and the blabbering mouth of the world’s worst lawyer the essential details
of the whistleblower’s alarm were soon made
public. Now armed with a simple and easily substantiated case so damnable
that it might even stand a snowballs
chance in Hell in the Senate, Pelosi dramatically declared that impeachment
proceedings would commence under the leadership of House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff who moved with lightning speed for Congress with a flurry of subpoenas for documents as
well as key individuals, including the whistleblower him/herself who is currently under
protection from possible threats to his/her life.
Developments
in the case emerge daily, fast than this blogger can hope to keep up with. Consult
your reliable news media daily rapidly breaking developments. Suffice it to say that at least cabinet members—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr, Vice President Mike Pence, and the ever babbling personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani
are also caught up in the scandal one way or another leading to the possibility
that not only an incumbent President
might be brought down, but his whole administration.
Most
observers are now sure that impeachment by the House is a sure thing and that a
Bill will be sent to the Senate before the first of next year.
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Trump has finally realized the danger he is in and is in full panic mode.
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Trump
has finally realized that he has been trapped and has responded with
increasingly bizarre Twitter rants
including demanding to know the identity of the whistleblower and all of
his/her informants hinting that they should be charged with treason.
He has also made similar charges of treason against Rep. Schiff
claiming that he should be hung. He has more than hinted at a possible civil
war if he is impeached and called the whole procedure an attempted coupe d’etat. The
ravings only dig the whole deeper for himself and some of them might result in
additional charges of obstruction of justice.
Impeachment
of a sitting President is not only difficult,
but rare. Only two Presidents have been impeached
in the House and neither was convicted in a Senate trial.
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Representing the House of Representatives as prosecutor, Thaddeus Stevens reads the bill of Impeachment to the Senate.
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After
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln his Tennessee border state Vice President Andrew
Johnson pursued a policy of reconciliation
with secessionist states and
their rapid rehabilitation within
the Union. This was in line with Lincoln’s own hopes for
restoring the Union. But it was at odds
with the Radical Republican majority
in the house which demanded harsh treatment of former Rebels and an expansive reconstruction that would empower freed slaves politically and economically
while protecting them retribution by Southern
Democrats. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania
saw a possibility for removing Johnson for violating the Tenure of
Office Act to restrict the power of
the President to remove cabinet members and certain other senior office-holders without the approval of the Senate. Johnson
was impeached by the House by an overwhelming
margin but a dramatic Senate trial ended with a 35–19 vote in favor of
conviction, one vote short of two-thirds
majority needed for conviction. A politically
crippled Johnson served out his term.
More
recently in 1998 Bill Clinton’s cheap and
tawdry affair with a starry eyed and naïve White House intern led to impeachment by the House of a still
popular President. Most Americans
were disgusted but then believed
that private sexual misconduct should
not be the cause to “overturn the results of an election.” The popular MoveOn movement began on that premise. Today in the Me Too Era many powerful men
have seen their careers destroyed on far less evidence than Monica Lewinski’s stained blue dress—witness
a risqué photo that brought down Senator Al Franklin. But back then the Senate voted 45–55 against
obstruction of justice and split 50–50 on perjury,
a tie that Vice President Al Gore had to recuse
himself from braking.
More
celebrated than the Clinton case was
the almost impeachment of Richard Nixon for numerous offences lumped together as the Watergate Scandal. Months of
investigative journalism and televised hearings by both House and
Senate special committees had built
an overwhelming case against the President.
Nixon was tempted to tough it out
hopping that a groundswell of support
by his beloved Silent Majority would
prevent conviction in the Senate. Then a
delegation of Republicans including Minority
Leader Hugh Scott, conservative icon Senator Barry Goldwater, and House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes
came to the White House to deliver the news that the game was over—the Senate would vote for impeachment if the House
delivered a Bill.
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Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached and flew off to political exile and disgrace.
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After
wavering a bitter and disappointed Nixon
finally decided to spare the nation
a show trial and a constitutional crisis. He delivered a one sentence letter of
resignation to the Secretary of State and
then boarded a military helicopter
on the White House lawn to fly into exile and disgrace. Gerald Ford went on television to announce “Our long
national nightmare has ended.”
Nobody
much expects the Mitch McConnell and
Senate Republicans will rise above their slavish
partisan devotion the President to act responsibly on clear evidence this
time. But some believe that the cornered rat might lash out so viciously
and commit more open violations of
the Constitution and the nation’s laws
in plain sight that even they—or some of them—might finally abandon him.
There
has been a long history of failed Presidential impeachment attempts.
Whigs wanted to go
after Andrew Jackson for beating the
Second Bank of the United States to
death and settled on a literal tempest-in-a-teapot
bringing back up the Eaton Affair back
in 1831 when Jackson demanded the resignations of most of his cabinet
members because their wives insulted the wife of his friend and
Secretary of War John Eaton. It was a flimsy excuse and brought forward years after the fact. It got nowhere because Democrats firmly controlled
Congress and everybody was scared to
death of the volcanic Presidential
temper. And everyone remembered what happened when a
Federal Court issued a ruling against his imposition of Marshall Law in Louisiana in
1815. After jailing at state legislator,
a prosecutor, and a Federal Judge he dismissed a writ of Habeas Corpus defiantly
asserting “The Judge made his ruling.
Now let him try to enforce it.”
No wonder politicians were terrified of Jackson. Trump terrifies no one except Senate Republicans
who fear that their MAGA cap wearing
base will rise up against them.
John Tyler was the first President to face a formal impeachment inquiry
In
1842 Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams led
an attempt to impeach John Tyler—an accidental President after the death of
Whig William Henry Harrison and a man without a party in Congress—for the
use of the veto to reject
Whig-backed tariffs. Vetoes had been seldom used previously and
there was some contention over just what a President could or could not achieve
by a veto. The attempt went nowhere but
it did end up confirming the right of the President to freely use the veto.
In
1860 Whigs again targeted a Democratic President, the hugely unpopular James Buchanan, a “Northern man of Southern principles,”
who had dilly-dallied through the impending secession crisis. At issue
was suspected wide-spread corruption in Buchanan’s home state of Pennsylvania. A special investigation committee did
uncover some staggering corruption and even possible treason. But it issued a report and Congress did not
act on impeachment. The election of 1860
would quickly dispose of Buchanan and render him an embarrassing footnote in American history.
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Republicans thought that Harry Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur might be impeachable.
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In
1951 Republican Congressmen George H.
Bender of Ohio and Paul W. Shafer of Michigan each introduced impeachment bills against Harry S. Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination. The resolutions were referred to the House Judiciary Committee which, being
run by Democrats, sat on them.
However, the Senate held extensive hearings on the matter. MacArthur benefited from a Senate
investigation and was promoted at a possible Presidential candidate himself. But he
faded away and a more tactful general
and war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, got the nod instead.
· There
were several attempts to launch impeachment investigations against George W. Bush. The most serious was
filed by Congressmen Denis Kucinich of
Ohio, and Robert Wexler of Florida in 2008 with several articles covering launching the War with Iraq,
lying about its justification, outing the identity of covert American intelligence
agent Valerie Palme, mistreatment of
detainees, covert attempts to over
throw the government of Iran, National Security Agency warrantless surveillance of American citizens, malfeasance in responding to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, as well as other complaints. It was a long
and unfocused laundry list however
justified any of the charges might have been.
The House voted to send the resolution to the Judiciary Committee which
let if quietly die before the 2008 election.
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Attempts to impeach Barack Obama hardly got beyond the stage of racist memes.
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Perhaps
in retribution to the Kucinich-Wexler articles, Republicans moved, or talked
loudly about moving, against Barack Obama from the beginning. Among the focus of allegations were the bogus claim that Obama was not born in the United States, allowed people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, allegedly covered-up after the 2012 Benghazi attack, and failure to enforce immigration laws. Despite chest
pounding and blather no list of
articles of impeachment was ever drawn up or proposed to the Judiciary
Committee.
Nobody
expects the current impeachment crisis will go away so easily.
