Ezra Klein: The case for normalizing impeachment

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/2017/11/30/16517022/impeachment-donald-trump
The case for normalizing impeachment
Impeaching an unfit president has consequences. But leaving one in office could be worse.
Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Nov 30, 2017, 6:00am EST



In recent months, I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal, or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel?

My fixation on this question began with President Donald Trump’s tweets to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. This was the president of the United States, the man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, launching deranged, unvetted provocations at the most singularly irrational regime in the world:

Link to tweet

This was not even his official policy. The rest of the Trump administration was trying to ratchet down tensions with North Korea. But the president himself was undermining the effort:

Link to tweet

Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the widely respected chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that the president was treating his office like “a reality show” and setting the country “on the path to World War III.” In an interview with the New York Times, he said of Trump, “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” These concerns, Corker told the Times, “were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.”

It’s not just Senate Republicans who worry over the president’s stability. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, told CNN that his reporting found “a consensus developing in the military, at the highest levels in the intelligence community, among Republicans in Congress, including the leaders in the business community,” that Trump “is unfit to be the president of the United States.” A subsequent poll by the Military Times found only 30 percent of commissioned officers approved of the job Trump was doing.

The fear is shared by members of Trump’s own staff. Axios’s Mike Allen reported that a collection of top White House advisers see themselves as an informal “Committee to Save America,” and they measure their success “mostly in terms of bad decisions prevented, rather than accomplishments chalked up.” The Associated Press reported that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “agreed in the earliest weeks of Trump's presidency that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.”

more...

https://www.vox.com/2017/11/30/16517022/impeachment-donald-trump

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[mnhtnbb]

2. Be interesting to see if your post draws any more discussion

than mine did this am.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029903031

[babylonsister]

3. I didn't see that, sorry.

I guess it's not that important. I heard Klein this a.m. He seemed very concerned; lots of people sounding the alarm.

[mnhtnbb]

4. It's a serious weakness in our form of government

that there is not a mechanism to remove someone who is so monumentally unfit for the office when the political party
that put him there has no ethical remorse or allegiance to the country to do what would be necessary for either
impeachment or use of the 25th amendment.