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Should Trump be impeached and removed?

Lurch

By Lurch
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Should Trump be impeached and removed?  

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  1. 1. Should Trump be impeached and removed?


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BearSchlong

BearSchlong 8077

Posted
Posted (edited)

No.  Stupid, unproductive waste of energy.

The Democrats should focus on stop being the party of losers and start being the party relevant to the deplorables.

It's their fucking fault that we have to look at that smug sociopath on the news.

Edited by BearSchlong
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SmokeyTheBear

SmokeyTheBear 5562

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, BearSchlong said:

No.  Stupid, unproductive waste of energy.

The Democrats should focus on stop being the party of losers and start being the party relevant to the deplorables.

It's their fucking fault that we have to look at that smug sociopath on the news.

giphy.webp

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SmokeyTheBear

SmokeyTheBear 5562

Posted
Posted
25 minutes ago, BearSchlong said:

No.  Stupid, unproductive waste of energy.

The Democrats should focus on stop being the party of losers and start being the party relevant to the deplorables.

It's their fucking fault that we have to look at that smug sociopath on the news.

 

3 minutes ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

In b4 full regardedness

missed it by that much

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Foosters

Foosters 17732

Posted
Posted
32 minutes ago, BearSchlong said:

No.  Stupid, unproductive waste of energy.

The Democrats should focus on stop being the party of losers and start being the party relevant to the deplorables.

It's their fucking fault that we have to look at that smug sociopath on the news.

Didn't you once say that he would go down as the greatest President in US History?

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25780

Posted
Posted (edited)

This is a more difficult question than it appears on the surface. The Economist's Lexington had a great article talking about Pelosi's strategy. (Pro tip: disable JavaScript for [*.]economist.com to get around the paywall.) The problem here is that we need the full support of GOP senators to make this happen, and we don't have it.

As I've said before, Trump is merely a symptom; McConnell is the real bad guy here.

And @BearSchlong is echoing something I myself has said: Can we trust the Democrats to lead us out of this mess when their idiotic coronation of Hillary got us into it?

Edited by Rimbo
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BearSchlong

BearSchlong 8077

Posted
Posted (edited)
3 minutes ago, Foosters said:

Didn't you once say that he would go down as the greatest President in US History?

Holy shit, you remember that?

I was very wrong.  I was just so happy that Hillary got beat.  I remember thinking "this is so crazy, it just might work!"

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wildcat09

wildcat09 29244

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Posted
Just now, Rimbo said:

This is a more difficult question than it appears on the surface. The Economist's Lexington had a great article talking about Pelosi's strategy. The problem here is that we need the full support of GOP senators to make this happen, and we don't have it.

As I've said before, Trump is merely a symptom; McConnell is the real bad guy here.

And @BearSchlong is echoing something I myself has said: Can we trust the Democrats to lead us out of this mess when their idiotic coronation of Hillary got us into it?

Can we trust them to? No. Do we need them to? Fuck yes. We don't have any other options. That's why we need them to get their shit together and stop being the same old worthless go-along-to-get-along dipshits they've always been.

I'm not optimistic but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be pressuring them to do what must be done.

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26270

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Posted
1 minute ago, Rimbo said:

This is a more difficult question than it appears on the surface. The Economist's Lexington had a great article talking about Pelosi's strategy. The problem here is that we need the full support of GOP senators to make this happen, and we don't have it.

That's what I'm saying. The poll question implies a parallel reality where the Republican Senate would go along. If we are going for parallel realities, why stop there, just have Trump lose in 2016 to some non-Hillary candidate who looks like Catwoman.

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wildcat09

wildcat09 29244

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Posted
Just now, RDCanecutter said:

That's what I'm saying. The poll question implies a parallel reality where the Republican Senate would go along. If we are going for parallel realities, why stop there, just have Trump lose in 2016 to some non-Hillary candidate who looks like Catwoman.

Which Catwoman are we talking about?

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

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Posted

Current House oversight ---> Impeachment inquiry ---> Impeachment hearings into early-mid 2020 ---> Let it bleed

Presidential debates:  "Today, the only thing preventing Donald Trump from being indicted, convicted and going to prison like every other felon is the security blanket afforded to him by being in the Oval Office.  If he's not President, he's in prison.  You decide."

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TexArcher

TexArcher 37509

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Posted

Should he be impeached and removed?  Of course.

But given that the current Senate absolutely will not vote to remove him, should he be impeached now?  Of course not.  It would be a boon to his re-election chances to impeach him now and have the Senate let him off the hook, or even for it to get held up until the election.

Save the impeachment bullet for after 2020, if we're stupid enough to re-elect the son-of-a-bitch.  The Dems should have both chambers of Congress then.

 

 

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wildcat09

wildcat09 29244

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This is why the Dems must impeach (even assuming the GOP Senate refuses to convict):

Quote

On February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died. Before his body was in the ground, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would block anyone President Barack Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s seat. The next week, Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican primary, quickly followed by Marco Rubio, and eventually Ted Cruz, leaving Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee. Polls showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump by solid margins, with forecasters pegging her chances of victory from 71 to 85 percent, and Democrats favored to take back the Senate.

I was working for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid at the time. Being in the minority limited our options for overcoming McConnell’s blockade. But whenever we started to contemplate more aggressive tactics, they were dismissed on the theory that the upcoming election would sort everything out. Why rock the boat, we told ourselves. We’re on a glide path to victory in November, and then President Clinton will submit her Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed by a Democratic Senate.

The rest is history. McConnell’s decision to block Garland consolidated Republican support behind Trump and helped him pull off a narrow victory. Instead of a Democratic president appointing a liberal justice to tilt the balance of the Supreme Court, Trump has appointed two justices to entrench a conservative majority for a generation.

Republicans wielded their power while we hoped for the best. And the course of history was altered forever.

There are two lessons here for House Democrats as they debate whether to open an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

First, polling can change.

I don’t know how else to say this: getting impeached is bad. It is not something you want to happen to you, especially if you’re president. You do not want to go down as one of only four presidents in history to be impeached. This is a bad thing. Only Democrats, bless our hearts, could convince ourselves that it is good for a president to be impeached.

Richard Nixon’s approval rating was at 65 percent when his impeachment process began and only 19 percent of the public supported his impeachment. By the end, the numbers had flipped: his approval was 24 percent and support for impeachment was 57 percent. Former president Bill Clinton survived because he was popular and the man pursuing him, Independent Counsel Ken Starr, was not. The public rightly thought Starr was on a fishing expedition. By contrast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is popular and the public thinks he is fair, while Trump is historically unpopular. Even though Clinton survived, his heir apparent lost the next election—which he had been heavily favored to win—while Republicans gained seats in Congress.

The second lesson from the Garland experience is that like nature, power abhors a vacuum. The decision not to impeach is not a decision to focus on other things, it is a decision to cede power, control, and legitimacy to Trump. Trump is not a master chess player, he just bluffs his opponents into forfeiting their moves—and that is exactly what he is doing to House Democrats.

For their part, House Democrats have argued that by foregoing impeachment they can shift the conversation to topics their consultants tell them are safer ground, like health care. That’s not going to happen. Reporters cover news, and only events that drive news can shift the message. House Democrats are understandably proud of having run and won on health care in the 2018 midterms. But their campaign messages were buoyed by a constant flood of major health care news coming out of Washington, DC, driven by the very real threat that Republicans would repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act. But since Democrats took back the House, that’s not going to happen. This is a good thing, but it severely limits Democrats’ ability to drive news on health care. Passing bills in the House that are guaranteed to go nowhere in McConnell’s Senate, as House Democrats recently did with bills to strengthen Obamacare and lower drug prices, will not drive a message.

The void that House Democrats are ceding to Trump is the space between now and election day. Filling that space with easy messages like health care is not a viable option. And a good rule of thumb of politics is that if you have the power to do something that hurts your opponent, you should do it.

Impeachment is a long process that will highlight Trump’s crimes, which according to (literally) one thousand former federal prosecutors, include “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Imagine the Michael Cohen, James Comey, or William Barr hearings but on steroids, for many weeks. Anything can happen and hearings can go haywire, but the odds of making a convincing public case against Trump are stacked strongly in Democrats’ favor. Trump’s crimes are serious and laid out in meticulous detail by an unimpeachable source. The public already believes he committed serious crimes by a margin of two to one. There is already a loud chorus decrying Trump’s crimes and arguing that he should be impeached, ranging from Kellyanne Conway’s husband to a sitting Republican Congressman. In this case, the impeachment process is like one of those meals where all the ingredients come in a box: you have to boil some water and maybe crack an egg, but it’s basically idiot-proof.

If and when the House votes to impeach, the ball goes to the Senate. The Senate can ignore it, which means the House’s impeachment is the last word. That would be fine. But McConnell would be under enormous pressure from Trump and the entire right-wing echosphere to call a Kangaroo court into session for the purpose of letting Trump off. If the Senate conducts a trial, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2020—like Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner—will have to decide whether to vote to remove from office a President who has been shown to have committed serious crimes, or protect him. They will likely vote to protect Trump and it will cost them: they will have to explain which of Trump’s many crimes they think are no big deal, why they disagree with the many voices from their own party saying his crimes make him unfit, and why a criminal president should be allowed to continue in office.

More importantly, if the public believes Trump is guilty but the Senate lets him off anyway, he won’t ever be truly exonerated—he’ll be O.J. Simpson, assumed guilty but sprung by allies and circumstance. Some Democrats have argued that we should skip impeachment and vote Trump out instead. But if the House impeaches Trump and Senate Republicans fall in line to protect him, the argument that the ballot is the only way to remove him will be supercharged.

By contrast, declining to impeach Trump validates his claim that Mueller exonerated him. At a Grand Rapids town hall held by Michigan’s Justin Amash, the lone Republican Congressman who has come out for impeachment, an attendee was confused by Amash’s position until hearing him lay out the case for an inquiry. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," she told NBC. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated." People will not know what Trump did wrong if Democrats don’t tell them.

Even more ominously, Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice under Barr, who has shown himself to be Trump’s eager and obedient partner in abusing the power of the state to advance the president’s political interests, will inevitably invent a pretext for investigating the Democratic nominee. Democrats should consider whether they’d rather engage that fight against a president who has been impeached for serious crimes, or against a president strengthened by the de facto exoneration bestowed when his opponents declined to pursue the evidence against him.

It is a long way from June 2019 to November 2020. And as they say in Boston, you can’t get there from here. Hoping everything turns out well while giving Trump free space to wield his power is unlikely to end well.

The fight will be hard for House Democrats and the appeal of dodging it is strong. But like the monsters in “It Follows,” this fight will find you. It already has.

There is no way over, under, or around impeachment—only through.

The Democratic leadership's fantasy vision of the period between now and November 2020 is "we avoid ruffling any undecideds' feathers by avoiding talk of impeachment while continued investigations make Trump look worse and worse and our candidates focus on the dinner-table issues." The fatal flaw with this approach is that it ignores what Trump and the GOP will be saying and doing, which is 1) accusing them of shitloads of crimes, and 2) rigging the election. The GOP isn't even hiding their attempts to destroy American democracy at this point.  Pretending otherwise isn't going to help, it will doom us all.  

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Zavala

Zavala 1384

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Posted
1 minute ago, triplehorn said:

Current House oversight ---> Impeachment inquiry ---> Impeachment hearings into early-mid 2020 ---> Let it bleed

Presidential debates:  "Today, the only thing preventing Donald Trump from being indicted, convicted and going to prison like every other felon is the security blanket afforded to him by being in the Oval Office.  If he's not President, he's in prison.  You decide."

So an impeachment move is just purposefully and obviously political smear now? 

Y I K E S

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BLKNSTY

BLKNSTY 289

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11 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

And @BearSchlong is echoing something I myself has said: Can we trust the Democrats to lead us out of this mess when their idiotic coronation of Hillary got us into it?

I personally love the BUT HILLARY! take.

yo, if Hillary wouldn't have been the nominee then it would have been Bernie. full-fucking-stop. 

maybe Bernie would have beat Trump. maybe he wouldn't.

but what I know for sure is if Bernie won, Trump would have won 2020 (out of most likely a 15+ GOP Nominee field). put me in the camp of better rip that band-aid off as early as possible.

 

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

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Posted
Just now, Zavala said:

So an impeachment move is just purposefully and obviously political smear now? 

Y I K E S

It's not a smear.  It's what you get when you have a complicit GOP.  Expose the shit out of it right up to the election.  The complicit Senate GOP can get wrecked.  cry me a river.

 

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26270

Posted
Posted
Just now, Lurch said:

You are incorrect about what the poll question implies.  I figured 6 words would be understandable by all.

I was wrong.

OK, here's what I understood your 6 words to encompass:

Should the House vote to impeach Trump, and should the Senate then vote to remove him?

Was that it, or was it something else?

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zork

zork 629

Posted
Posted (edited)
15 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Am I wrong about that? If I am incorrect in thinking removal would require a majority of the Senators to vote for it, then so be it.

I think 66 of them would need to vote to impeach if it comes to that.

edit:  actually 67 unless there is one vacant seat.

Edited by zork
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wildcat09

wildcat09 29244

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Posted
2 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

It's not a smear.  It's what you get when you have a complicit GOP.  Expose the shit out of it right up to the election.  The complicit Senate GOP can get wrecked.  cry me a river.

 

The Dems aren't exposing the GOP's complicity though. They can't even effectively communicate to most people what the Mueller report says, much less all of Trump's other crimes, and every time impeachment comes up in an interview their leadership frames the matter as if the GOP reps and senators currently have reasonable disagreements over whether the litany of Trump's crimes and corrupt conduct constitute impeachable offenses.

You want to expose the GOP's complicity? Hold televised impeachment hearings for two months and compile your entire case against Trump into a presentation on all of his crimes, including crimes before and after he became President. Hell, there very possibly could be over 100 different counts for distinct crimes/corrupt conduct. Then impeach the motherfucker and make every GOP senator explain to the American people why they don't think each of crimes 1 through 100 merit conviction and removal.

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29177

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Lurch said:

It was that.  A+

i think it's just the realization that your poll question is not at all realistic, despite people's understandings/opinions.

like asking if texas should win the next 5 national championships.  the odds are probably about the same.

the real question is, "knowing the senate won't remove, should the house move forward with impeachment proceedings?"

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

The Dems aren't exposing the GOP's complicity though. They can't even effectively communicate to most people what the Mueller report says, much less all of Trump's other crimes, and every time impeachment comes up in an interview their leadership frames the matter as if the GOP reps and senators currently have reasonable disagreements over whether the litany of Trump's crimes and corrupt conduct constitute impeachable offenses.

You want to expose the GOP's complicity? Hold televised impeachment hearings for two months and compile your entire case against Trump into a presentation on all of his crimes, including crimes before and after he became President. Hell, there very possibly could be over 100 different counts for distinct crimes/corrupt conduct. Then impeach the motherfucker and make every GOP senator explain to the American people why they don't think each of crimes 1 through 100 merit conviction and removal.

Considering how short the attention span is for the average 'murican, it's too soon.  Nevertheless, it's starting next week, and once the courts finish clearing the path, it'll accelerate.

 

 

Edited by triplehorn
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Rimbo

Rimbo 25780

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Posted
27 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Can we trust them to? No. Do we need them to? Fuck yes. We don't have any other options. That's why we need them to get their shit together and stop being the same old worthless go-along-to-get-along dipshits they've always been.

I'm not optimistic but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be pressuring them to do what must be done.

As the Economist article covers oh-so-well (and you really should read it), a failed attempt at impeachment is worse than no impeachment at all.

We (and by "we" I mean "Americans who are not traitors," not "Democrats") should impeach him, but if we can't do it successfully, we just shoot ourselves in the foot by the attempt.

11 minutes ago, BLKNSTY said:

I personally love the BUT HILLARY! take.

yo, if Hillary wouldn't have been the nominee then it would have been Bernie. full-fucking-stop. 

maybe Bernie would have beat Trump. maybe he wouldn't.

but what I know for sure is if Bernie won, Trump would have won 2020 (out of most likely a 15+ GOP Nominee field). put me in the camp of better rip that band-aid off as early as possible.

Bernie would have beat Trump, because he appealed not only to the far Left, but also to the working-class voters in the Rust Belt who delivered Trump into the White House. Hillary was the absolute worst candidate possible for those voters, as the crowned queen of Democratic support for business over unions and the Elite.

Trump wouldn't have won 2020 because he never would have run for president in 2020. Getting elected was never his intention. He didn't decide that he was meant to be president all along until after he was elected. This is all well-documented by this point.

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DigglerontheHoof

DigglerontheHoof 21061

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Posted
5 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

i think it's just the realization that your poll question is not at all realistic, despite people's understandings/opinions.

like asking if texas should win the next 5 national championships.  the odds are probably about the same.

the real question is, "knowing the senate won't remove, should the house move forward with impeachment proceedings?"

Even with the bolded I'm a "yes".  History should be able to see how cowardly and corrupt the Republicans are.  A vote against his removal will be just that. 

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28711

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Posted

Of course. He's unfit for office. Go by everything the Republicans said about why Clinton should be impeached and he meets all their criteria. If it weren't for their craven hypocrisy, he'd already be gone. 

He's an unindicted co-conspirator in a felony campaign finance violation. That alone is grounds for impeachment. He hasn't just obstructed justice, the obstruction is ongoing. He's using his office for personal enrichment and to do favors for those who pay him. He's the most corrupt president, and has the most corrupt administration, in our history. 

The Republicans never should have allowed him on their ballot and he's doing irreparable harm to their Party. 

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Lurch

Lurch 5921

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i think it's just the realization that your poll question is not at all realistic, despite people's understandings/opinions.
like asking if texas should win the next 5 national championships.  the odds are probably about the same.
the real question is, "knowing the senate won't remove, should the house move forward with impeachment proceedings?"


The question is exactly what it was meant to be. That you insist upon parsing it into something else is entirely on you.
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