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MrRodgers -> RE: Impeachment ? There's precedent alright. (10/13/2017 12:35:49 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BamaD
quote:
ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
It is a rather convenient that Corker is leaving (not running again) otherwise he'd have to contest with the dittohead R's in the congress. You know the ones. those who'd support Trump even if he did shoot someone on the streets of Manhattan.
But since Corker’s not running for reelection, he felt free to go on the record: Trump “concerns me,” Corker said in an interview later that day, “he would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” His recklessness and lack of emotional discipline could, Corker said, put us “on the path to World War III.”
Aside from the 25th amend. and even Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) concentrated on obstruction. However, there is more...a lot more. But...did the Framers really leave us defenseless against it ? (this)
Actually, no: impeachment’s structure, purpose, and history suggest a remedy broad enough to protect the body politic from federal officers whose lack of stability and competence might cause serious harm. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there’s no constitutional barrier to impeaching a president whose public conduct makes reasonable people worry about his access to nuclear weapons.
As Cass Sunstein writes in his forthcoming book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, “If a president uses the apparatus of government in an unlawful way, to compromise democratic processes and invade constitutional rights, we come to the heart of what the impeachment provision is all about.”
But that’s not all impeachment is about. During the Philadelphia Convention’s most extensive period of debate on the remedy’s purpose, James Madison declared it “indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate.”
Those faults might be survivable when they afflict individual legislators, Madison argued, because “the soundness of the remaining members would maintain the integrity and fidelity” of the branch as a whole. But “the Executive magistracy… was to be administered by a single man,” and “loss of capacity” there “might be fatal to the Republic.”
According to the house impeachment committee:
"The House has the power to impeach, and the Senate to remove, a federal officer whose conduct “seriously undermine public confidence in his ability to perform his official functions.”
Judge Pickering 1804: federal judge John Pickering, a man “of loose morals and intemperate habits,” per the charges against him. Pickering had committed no crime, but was removed by the Senate in 1804 for the “high misdemeanor” of showing up to work drunk and ranting like a maniac in court. Such conduct was “disgraceful to his own character as a judge, and degrading to the honor and dignity of the United States.”
Not the only one:
Others include judges Mark Delahay (1873), “intoxicated off the bench as well as on the bench,” and George W. English (1926), whose bizarre conduct included, among other things, summoning “several state and local officials to appear before him in an imaginary case,” and haranguing them “in a loud, angry voice, using improper, profane, and indecent language.” “By his decisions and orders he inspired fear and distrust” Article V summed up, “to the scandal and disrepute of said court.”
Andrew Johnson:
Princeton political scientist Keith Whittington has called “the pre-modern Trump.” The 10th article of impeachment against Johnson charged the president with “a high misdemeanor in office” based on a series of “intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues” he’d delivered in an 1866 speaking tour. Those speeches, according to Article X, were “peculiarly indecent and becoming in the Chief Magistrate” and brought his office “into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace.”
Johnson did a campaign tour: wrote U.S. Grant:
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, dragged along on the tour, wrote to his wife that “I have never been so tired of anything before as I have been with the political stump speeches of Mr. Johnson. I look upon them as a national disgrace.”
Impeachment is still of course a political process:
But according to Rep. Benjamin Butler (R-MA), a key impeachment manager in the Johnson case, the backlash against the president’s speeches made impeachment possible: “they disgusted everybody.” As Jeffrey Tulis explained in his seminal work The Rhetorical Presidency, “Johnson’s popular rhetoric violated virtually all of the nineteenth-century norms” surrounding presidential popular communication: “he stands as the stark exception to general practice in that century, so demagogic in his appeals to the people” that he resembled “a parody of popular leadership.”
Trump:
Twitter feed
CIA speech
Boy Scout speech
Trump tramples the sort of tacit norms that separate us from banana republic status, like: a president shouldn't tell active-duty military to “call those senators” on behalf of his agenda, suggest that his political opponents should be put in jail, or make off-the-cuff threats of nuclear annihilation.
Go read the link...a Trump tweet from 2014:
The Framers are gathered at the Philadelphia Convention and one says: “I keep thinking we should include something in the Constitution in case the people elect a [expletive deleted] moron.”
But just maybe they did include something. Now that's funny.
HERE
You do know that even Johnson was impeached for violating a law.
That law was later ruled to be unconstitutional.
The really funny thing about this was that every Democrat sworn up and down that since perjury
didn't rise to the level of treason or bribery Clinton couldn't be impeach for mere perjury.
Now merely not liking the President is grounds, according to the Democrats,
for impeachment.
All 3 would be impeachable of course but I honestly can't decide just which one of those I'd say for sure...Clinton was guilty.
The idea of their being such precedent, is that the matter before the congress in such a case, would be Trump and all of his associated improprieties and venality.
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