Without Impeachment, We're Lowering Standards for All Future Presidents

[babylonsister]

https://truthout.org/articles/without-impeachment-were-lowering-standards-for-all-future-presidents/

Without Impeachment, We’re Lowering Standards for All Future Presidents
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

Published April 24, 2019

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Speaker Pelosi and her friends are worried about that 36 percent approval rating, about winning the public relations battle with the right’s formidable messaging machine. They must be reminded that, at the outset of the Watergate hearings in May 1973, the approval rating for impeaching and removing President Richard Nixon stood at 19 percent. By the time Nixon resigned the presidency in August of 1974, that number had reached 57 percent. The hearings made the difference.

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House Democrats must initiate the impeachment process and lay it all out there for the people to see. If certain witnesses like McGahn are mired in a court battle with the White House, call other witnesses. Or else simply read the Mueller report testimony into the congressional record, the way depositions are read into trial records when a witness is unavailable.

When the process reaches the Senate, the impeachment trial will be a spectacle for the ages. There are 22 Senate Republicans facing re-election in 2020, and 20 Republican votes needed to pass an order of impeachment (provided the Senate Democratic caucus holds together).

Every Republican in that chamber will be required to vote in public on the fitness of Trump to serve as president with all the evidence laid out, and more than a third of them will then have to run on that record. They will be way out there in the daylight with the whole world watching, and that will be worth the price of admission all by itself.

In the end and all politics aside, the question of whether impeachment would be ultimately successful is moot. It must be done because the rule of law, indeed the country itself, is on the line. If impeachment proceedings are not undertaken against Donald Trump in the face of such overwhelming criminal evidence, a partisan attorney general and a partisan Republican majority in the Senate will have set the standard of conduct for all presidents to come so low as to be utterly unrecognizable and thoroughly unenforceable.

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A lot of people thought a man like Donald Trump could never become president. The fact that he is president means all bets are off and someone even worse could follow. Even someone better must not be allowed to enjoy the new powers that will be baked into the executive branch if there are no legal consequences for what has transpired.

It’s not only about Trump. It’s about every president to come. It’s about us, and whether we have the courage to do what is right regardless of the final outcome.

[unblock]

1. oh, that's just ridiculous!

everyone knows the lower standards will apply only to republican presidents!

[defacto7]

2. How much lower can presidential standards get than they are now?

If this is an impassable bar there will never be standards for any president.

[Azathoth]

3. The bar is already irretreviably underwater

The fact that Trump has "served" two years and will almost certainly serve another two in the White House has permanently diminished the office, which was precisely what the right wing cult intended.

Impeaching Trump, while constitutionally necessary, will be perceived by 40% of the country as a "Demonrat political attack," not as an enforcement of minimum standards of behavior. The only lesson future Republican presidents will take from the ordeal will be that they need to be even more ruthless and extreme.

I agree that we need to force the GOP collaborators in the Senate to stand up in front of the country and own their support of Trump's criminality, but I don't think there is any chance it will hurt most of them with their voters or repair any of the damage that has been done to our institutions.

[Dan]

4. There have been comments made about this

But now I wonder, if the Congress does nothing except voice their concerns, then maybe Trump has a point. Why should he leave the White House, even if voted out... apparently the Senate will continue to support his continued occupation of the White House, and the House will just voice complaints about his unwillingness to leave.

The way things are going with the Senate and the SCOTUS - the GOP may decide that the House is no longer a legal body of the government. Trump decides what laws he will obey; whether or not he will accept oversight by the House - and the GOP Senate says nothing.

It’s ugly beyond belief, maybe we truly are heading for a second civil war. Unless we agree that this minority has the right to rule with Trump as their King.

On edit, I am just so disgusted - I want the House to do something, fight, even if we lose, but at least fight, stand for something except harsh words.