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Celerity

(51,430 posts)
Fri May 31, 2019, 12:37 PM May 2019

WaPo Op Ed: If Trump doesn't warrant impeachment, who does? [View all]

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?

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