The Time for Impeachment Is Here

If Democrats were smarter, they would understand that initiating the impeachment of Trump might actually galvanize their base because it would demonstrate that leadership was willing to take the obvious, the logical and the constitutional step once presented with such an abundance of evidence. They would grasp that the visual of their party standing up to a president wedded equally to corruption and to his assortment of bigotries would be appealing to an electorate where black voters are increasingly driving the conversation. Democrats would seize upon the Mueller Report as a flashpoint for organization and recruitment, rather than take the task of prosecution that the Constitution assigned to Congress, hand it off to voters and call that “democracy.” It is up to us as citizens to choose our elected officials, not to do their jobs for them.

Wouldn't impeachment come to a screeching halt in the Republican-controlled Senate?

Wouldn't it be better to spend the time and effort on getting Democrats elected in 2020?

Yes, he is a horrible president and person. We need him gone, but the time it would take to attempt an impeachment will drastically affect the elections.

With Pelosi and Democratic controlled house, hopefully he can be controlled until he is voted out. Then maybe one of the courts can convict him of something.

Just some thoughts.

Members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Over the past two years, Republicans in Congress have made the decision that not offending their corrupt an immoral President is in the best interest for their political future. Making the moral and right decision of speaking out against Trump's corruption does not matter to them. All Congressional members, whether they are Republican or Democrat or Independent have a duty and obligation to speak out and vote against a President that has committed impeachable offenses. Any reasonable person can look at Trump's actions and what has been exposed about his obstruction and deceit in the Mueller report and conclude he deserves impeachment. At this point, political considerations should not be considered. Deciding whether to impeach based on that decision effecting a member of Congress being re-elected is wrong and goes against the Constitution. The only thing that should be considered is if the President has been involved in activities that deserve impeachment. The establishment of precedent is important. If President Obama, or President Bush, or President Hillary Clinton had been guilty of the same offenses Trump has committed, they would have already been impeached and removed.

I'm pretty sure Nixon would have been convicted by the Senate. But I don't think it was a republican/democrat thing. I think it was an accountability thing. Voting for a Nixon acquittal would have been political suicide for the far right.

I think Blackburn will shill for Trump.

I think we have some East Tennessee representatives that will shill for Trump, but I also think we have some some aren't necessarily locked into the strategy. No one wants to buy a ticket on the Titanic. Everyone in East Tennessee knows a diabetic. Trump specifically, as well as those loyal to him are actively engaged in killing off diabetics. Once the House expands the investigation to Trumps corruption from Russian interference in the election, evidence will be laid on the table.

There is enough evidence to impeach, and pass it on to the Senate, right now. There may or may not be enough evidence to convict. In addition, one cannot disqualify a Senator for prejudice or cause. But, a quid pro quo vote by a Senator is a crime that will go to civilian court. A kangaroo court will ultimately be judged by the citizens. I think this could get interesting.

On a thread seeking opinions and input on the Tn.GOP fake twitter account.......

"It's a pretty neat specific, from a local hacker standpoint, but you have to remember that Robert Mueller's standard as a special prosecutor is not beyond reasonable doubt, it is absolute certainty. What that means in terms of a collusion charge is this, he has to have absolute, incontrovertible evidence, at every juncture , that there was an agreed upon quid pro quo, and once it was determined that Donald Trump Jr. was too stupid to be held accountable, we would have to get it from the Russians in order for Mueller to act. There is probably enough to convict Trump, beyond reasonable doubt, in a civilian court right now. But, one does not try a president in civilian court. One has an impeachment, a fitness hearing if you will, process at which point the House of Representatives determines if the President should be tried by the Senate. The Senate has the power to determine whether or not to convict the president of the charges thereby removing him from office. Any quid pro quo between Trump and Pence, i.e." I'll resign and you can pardon me" is illegal, I believe. There is a lot of this kind of stuff in the evidence. Lots of crimes have been committed. Just because it's misclassified initially, and is a different crime than what it originally looked like it was, doesn't make it any less a crime. I think you have to move forward with the investigation, regardless of whether you think you can convict in the Senate. Once Trump is out of office either soon, in two, or in six years, civilian criminal standards go in effect. We are living in interesting times. Should impeachment proceed and evidence of criminal, corrupt, or unethical behavior be exposed, and not acted upon, our system of government operates under the premise that ultimately balance will be restored via the polls. I think we're fixing to see if our constitution still works."

I hope, if there is an impeachment committee, that Representative Burchett has the appropriate clearances and gets a chance to participate. I also hope that he takes his personal integrity seriously. I know he knows the difference between right and wrong, and I hope he acts appropriately.

Over/ under on a six years spread that Trump is on foreign soil if/when Senate convicts and he immediately asks for asylum because he claims America's first impeachment conviction is a coup.

Democrats are on cruise control to lose both the House and the Presidency in 2020.

No one cares about any of this.

IMO, Trump's financial dealings and the SDNY (or maybe the New York state courts) are going to do him in the minute he leaves office.

Well, Trump deserves to be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate and removed from office and sent to prison, but...

It's wasted effort, since the amoral, self-centered cowards in the Republican Party of the Senate will never vote to convict him. And even if they did, we have Pence. Who's a right wing nut job, too.

Look, the best way to handle Trump and his goose stepping racist/fascist followers is to beat them at the polls. And the best way to do that is to nominate a candidate who can actually beat him. And get the voters to the polls. Democrats managed not to do that last time.

Democrats put too much hope into the Special Counsel investigation. And now they are putting too much hope in winning by just saying, "Hey, Trump's bad." That's only part of the message, and shouldn't even be the main part. The Democratic nominee needs to make it clear that Democrats have more to offer politically, socially, economically, internationally, environmentally, and militarily that the current incompetent, corrupt, ignorant and inept Administration. And the Republicans have sold the American people a bill of goods, playing them for chumps.

An Open Memo: Comparison of Clinton Impeachment, Nixon Impeachment and Trump Pre-Impeachment

In 1973 and 1974, the Democrats attacked a once-mighty but now badly weakened president with a strong case for impeachment. Nixon resigned.

In 1998 and 1999, the Republicans attacked a mightily popular president on a political upswing in his second term with a politically contrived and feeble case for impeachment. Republicans lost.

In 2019, the Democrats confront the weakest president in modern history with a stronger case for impeachment than the one against Nixon.

Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic is spot-on here.
Impeachment Is a Refusal to Accept the Unacceptable

The Constitution is what Camus would call a “closed universe”—a space of “coherence and unity” in an incoherent world, in which words carry weight and actions have consequences. Trump’s disrespect for the law is a reminder of how fragile that structure of meaning can be. For that reason, there is a real service in using impeachment proceedings to push back against the notion that, in the parlance of the internet, “lol nothing matters.”

...

Gerald Ford, as a member of the House of Representatives, argued in 1970 that an impeachable offense is “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” He was not wrong that impeachment is a political process; it is, after all, entrusted to Congress. To treat the subject as an entirely political calculation, though—as Ford did and as Pelosi appears to be doing now—is to slouch toward nihilism. Treating the words high crimes and misdemeanors as if they hold real significance, however, is a way of protesting that the world should not be as it inevitably is.

This is perhaps overly earnest. But there is a real humanity and purity of purpose in asserting earnestness against the void.