WaPo Op Ed: If Trump doesn't warrant impeachment, who does?

[Celerity]

By Eugene Robinson

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-trump-doesnt-warrant-impeachment-who-does/2019/05/30/0ae3ee8a-8311-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html

What would a president have to do, hypothetically, to get this Congress to impeach him?

Obstruct a Justice Department investigation, perhaps? No, apparently that’s not enough. What about playing footsie with a hostile foreign power? Abusing his office to settle personal grievances? Using instruments of the state, including the justice system, to attack his perceived political opponents? Aligning the nation with murderous foreign dictators while forsaking democracy and human rights? Violating campaign-finance laws with disguised hush-money payments to alleged paramours?

Giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Defying requests and subpoenas from congressional committees charged with oversight? Refusing to protect our electoral system from malign foreign interference? Cruelly ripping young children away from their asylum-seeking parents? Lying constantly and shamelessly to the American people, to the point where not a single word he says or writes can be believed?

President Trump has done all of this and more. If he doesn’t warrant the opening of an impeachment inquiry, what president ever would?

The message that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivered Wednesday was clear. Keeping scrupulously within the bounds of his 448-page report, he took pains to highlight three points: If the evidence had shown that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice, the report would have said so. Mueller believed, however, that he had no authority to charge Trump with a crime. And “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal-justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

That process, like it or not, is impeachment. I’ve been back and forth on the wisdom of taking that step, but there’s one question that nags me: If the impeachment clause of the Constitution wasn’t written for a president like Trump, then why is it there?

snip

[unblock]

1. questions with "deserve" in them are often the wrong question.

Of course he "deserves" impeachment.
And removal, and barred from further office, and indicted, and tried, and convicted, and imprisoned, and forced to watch and listen to liberal programming 24/7.

We're way beyond that.

What matters now is how best to proceed given a senate that is highly unlikely to remove.

How do we best force their hand and how do we win big in 2020 elections.

Impeachment can and should play a big part in that strategy, but those are the important questions at this point.

[at140]

2. Reagan, Bush-43 & Nixon deserved impeachment

Reagan for Iran-Contra illegal activity.
Bush-43 for invading Iraq without concrete proof of WMD's.
Nixon for coverup & obstruction to justice. He quit before impeachment.
Trump for letting Russia interfere in our election.

[mopinko]

3. i have long thought that the pay off of the clinton impeachment

was the dirtying up of the process such that anyone who tried to use it when it actually was warranted would have scale mt bullshit to do it.
and here we are.