The president should be impeached and removed from office. If at all possible this should be done tomorrow. Normal procedures, for hearings in the House and a lengthy trial in the Senate should be set aside. Only a single article is needed. The charge should be sedition. It can be drafted tonight, debated in the morning and voted out of the House by lunchtime. The Senate can suspend its rules and move to summary judgement. Allow for four hours of debate and then call the vote.
I don't know if he has become mentally unhinged as some of his close supporters are privately saying, and I don't care. He has violated his oath of office in a manner so brazen that if he is not removed, I am not sure the country can survive the precedent.
Update: The likelihood of removing Trump before the end of his term appears to be going downhill very rapidly. The Democratic majority leader has announced that the House will not sit again until after the inauguration. And with the resignation of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao it seems unlikely the cabinet will act to invoke the 25th amendment.
Update II: Maybe Stenny Hoyer spoke too soon. Speaker Pelosi has now threatened swift impeachment if Trump is not removed via the 25th amendment.
Think again. If you think events today were ugly, multiply it 100 fold if the president is removed with only two weeks left in office.
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect, you cannot be serious.
ReplyDeleteAnd what do you think is the appropriate response to a president who has been lying through his teeth and spreading patently phony conspiracy theories for three months in an attempt to subvert a lawful election, culminating with inciting a violent attack on the nation's Capitol that resulted in someone getting shot and killed? There is not a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump is guilty of sedition.
ReplyDeleteJohn, the logic you are using is not unlike that that leads to at best, vigilante justice, at worst, a lynching. Calm down & consider the 25th Amendment as a better way of removing a man no longer capable pf performing the duties of the office of President.
ReplyDeleteJustice administered while passions are inflamed is rarely justice.
Who knows? Four years of being hounded about collusions with the Russians could drive anybody mad.
You are right that he should be impeached and removed, but I am doubtful that he will be. Same goes for the XXV amendment.
ReplyDeleteJustice Oliver Wendell Holmes once facetiously asked one of his law clerks what is the most important law in the United States. When the clerk admitted his bafflement at the question, Holmes replied “the law of five—if you have five justices behind, you can do anything. With only four, nothing.” Mutatis mutandis, the same goes here. It does not matter how just your cause, if you lack the votes, you cannot get it done. Both impeachment and XXV remedies lack the votes.
The only method of removing Pres. Trump that has the requisite votes is the one that was invoked formally and irrevocably in the early hours of this morning—the election of Joe Biden. It will come into effect in 13 days and no sooner, quite regardless of the (as you rightly note) awful precedent that will be set by leaving Pres. Trump in office after yesterday’s shameful incitement to riot.
The good news, as Adam Smith observed, is that there is a lot of ruin in a nation. The bad news is that some stains never entirely wash out. Our long, unbroken tradition of a peaceful transfer of power ended yesterday. Pres. Assad, Pres. Putin, & Chairman Xi all got their wish yesterday, to see the United States reduced to their own grubby level, all by the work of soi-disant “patriots”-cum-terrorists.
The USA has become the laughing stock of the world. All who point fingers and cry out the loudest are trying to cover their oen tails.
ReplyDelete