12/14/2019
On Friday, December 13, The New York Times front-paged a rather unusual opinion piece that was not a typical liberal celebration of the impeachment process. Instead, it warned that the current effort to remove President Trump was a dangerous escalation of politics in Washington.
The article noted that the filibuster was once a rare tactic, but now it is commonplace. In the same way, impeachment could become a normal strategy from overuse, since the Democrats have depended on it to remove Trump from Day #1 of his term.
Furthermore, some D-partiers like Al Green (D-TX) state openly that they hope to impeach the president again if the current effort does not work out. Apparently, one failure does not dissuade stubborn Dems from dismantling an election.
Below, Democrats held a press conference on Tuesday to discuss their impeachment intentions.
Indeed, author and TV personality Mark Levin recently recommended that Republicans should play impeachment hardball in the future.
He underlined the tactic, remarking, “The next Democrat president of the United States must be impeached. Not to get even, not because we are at their low level. But because the Republicans can’t live under one constitution when the Democrats live under another constitution.”
So Democrats have created another division in the country because they will not accept the choice of more than 62 million voters in 2016. The truth is that libs disapprove of anyone unlike them in political outlook and are willing to go to extreme lengths to get power.
In a Polarized Era, Will Impeachment Become a ‘New Normal’?, New York Times, December 12, 2019
WASHINGTON — It was a powerful congressional weapon deployed in only the most extreme cases, so explosive that lawmakers feared the wider damage it could do if used for the wrong reasons. Today, the filibuster is an everyday part of Senate business, standard operating procedure in a polarized world where the once rare has become commonplace.
With the House poised to impeach President Trump on a mainly party-line vote and Republicans already threatening retribution, fears are mounting that presidential impeachment might, like the filibuster, become a regular feature of America’s weaponized politics, with members of the party out of the White House but in control of the House routinely trying to oust a president they find objectionable.
The escalating use of the filibuster and the rising toxicity of Supreme Court confirmation hearings are examples of how scorched-earth politics can be hard to extinguish once one party feels aggrieved and gets the opportunity to exact revenge.
“We’ve already got the forms, all we have to do is eliminate Donald Trump’s name and put Joe Biden’s name in there,” Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, declared Monday, suggesting that Republicans could easily go after a Democratic president if control of the White House and the House were flipped.
Presidential impeachment was once almost unthinkable because of the gravity of overturning the results of an election. For more than two centuries, only one president — Andrew Johnson in 1868 — was subjected to a Senate trial. It became more common in the political lexicon after President Nixon resigned in the face of impeachment in 1974.
After President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, trial and 1999 acquittal, some opponents of his next two successors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, unsuccessfully raised calls to impeach them. In 2016, some top congressional Republicans discussed impeaching Hillary Clinton before the election was even held. And, as House Republicans have frequently mentioned, some liberal advocacy groups were calling for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in the days before his inauguration in January 2017.
“The question going forward, of course, will be whether the Trump impeachment conditions the public to understand impeachment as a tool of normal politics, or whether it retains its exceptional character,” said Josh Chafetz, a constitutional law professor at Cornell Law School. “The Clinton impeachment does not seem to have been enough to make it a tool of normal politics, but maybe this time will be different.”
Top Democrats acknowledge being torn. Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled recently that she was under pressure to initiate impeachment proceedings against Mr. Bush for invading Iraq on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction, but she resisted.
“I just didn’t want it to be a way of life in our country,” she said during a town hall on CNN.
Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Clinton White House during the impeachment, agrees that there is a risk that “we are going to normalize impeachment and it is going to have a cascading effect in the way Bork became a term,” he said, referring to Robert H. Bork, the Supreme Court nominee rejected after a fiery 1987 hearing that inflames conservatives to this day.
But like Ms. Pelosi, with whom he later served in the House leadership, Mr. Emanuel said the greater risk was to ignore what he considered egregious and clearly impeachable behavior by the president.
“You have to weigh both of those and realize that you cannot as a country of laws allow someone to conduct themselves as if the law doesn’t apply to them,” Mr. Emanuel said.
Democrats believe the brazen acts of Mr. Trump, captured on a White House transcript pressing a foreign leader to investigate a presidential rival while he was withholding desperately needed military aid, were so blatant that an impeachment vote was required despite its potential future consequences. They see the case against Mr. Trump as a textbook example of why the founding fathers created impeachment, and consider it far worse than Mr. Clinton’s case, in which he was accused of lying about his sexual relationship with an intern.
Yet Republicans view the current episode through the opposite lens, saying that the Republican-led impeachment of Mr. Clinton was fully justified while the action against Mr. Trump is purely political and unsupported by the evidence.
“President Clinton committed a crime, perjury,” Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Clinton in 1998, said Thursday as the House Judiciary Committee drafted articles of impeachment against the president. “This president isn’t even accused of committing a crime.” (Continues)
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