Let’s imagine that after the midterm elections of 2018, there is a majority in the House of Representatives (218 congresspeople) who vote for the impeachment of President Trump. Combination of all Dems and a few never-Trumpers in the Republican Party. There will then be a trial before the 100 (99 without the Honorable John McCain) members of the US Senate with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. In this hypothetical case the prosecution would have to present actual evidence before the Senate body conforming to the articles of impeachment.
Is there any evidence? His foes claim to have evidence but cannot reveal it on national security grounds. True, several people close to him have been indicted on financial irregularity charges which however predate his administration. Actual evidence would have to be presented. Meeting with a foreign leader in private might not be grounds. Every President has done this. There was no screaming of treason when he met with Kim Jong Un, a foreign leader who threatened to nuke the US.
What would the prosecutor’s case be based upon other than emotion?
AIUI, technically doesn’t require evidence of any sort - you can impeach for anything.
But I have a hard time seeing a 2/3 majority in the Senate for removal from office, barring the most extreme of circumstances.
I mean Bill Clinton actually committed perjury, didn’t he? That was a slam dunk as far as evidence was concerned, wasn’t it? and yet he beat it.
Andrew Johnson was impeached charged with your typical “high crimes and misdemeanors”, technically he had violated a law passed by congress. He beat it as well.
What’s worrying is that the forces aligned against President Trump, going all out to dethrone him, and failing by any and all legal means, may go actively searching for your typical “Lone Nut” who, as history has shown, can be counted upon to save their day. The resultant national freak out would be over the top.
The Senate can pretty much do as it pleases during impeachment proceedings; its determinations are not subject to review.* In fact, during the impeachment of Johnson the Senate ignored or overruled several procedural determinations made by Chief Justice Chase. One of the charges against Johnson was that he made speeches ridiculing Congress, which was not then prohibited by any law (and which for obvious reasons is probably not subject to a legal prohibition anyway).
It is also worth noting that Clinton’s “perjury” (for which he received a civil court judgement, not a criminal one) came after years of investigation and close questioning about the most intimate details of his life. One suspects that President Trump, subject to the same level of scrutiny and questioning, would fare far less well with regard to telling the truth under oath.
Given that there is more than enough evidence in the public sphere to justify an investigation (not to convict yet, mind you, but to warrant the investigation in the first place) it seems a little odd to characterize the Mueller investigation as a partisan attempt to unfairly “dethrone” the current President rather than as a legitimate investigation into what is already known to be a significant level of involvement by the Russian government with the Trump campaign and the Republicans in general during the 2016 election. I suppose that someone who observed the partisan efforts by the Republicans to oppose and hinder the previous administration without concrete grounds to do so might naturally suppose that a similar effort was involved here, but that would be to disregard the very real and potentially corrupt practices under investigation.
Your concern that those who oppose Trump will resort to assassination is however without merit. It is also somewhat ironic given that some of the individuals believed to be involved in the interactions between Russia and the Trump campaign have subsequently disappeared or turned up dead.
Clinton didn’t necessarily beat it in that sense, impeachment allows only for the removal of the President from office. The Senators who voted against impeachment may have simply felt that while he certainly committed perjury, it didn’t meet what is a vaguely described threshold for removal from office. Interestingly the GOP had 55 Senators at the time, they got only 50 to vote for removal from office on the obstruction of justice charge and only 45 on the perjury–so not only did they not pry away any Democrats to their side they didn’t even get full support of their own caucus in the Senate.
He might be impeached in the house (*although I doubt it), but unless some incredibly damning evidence comes out of the Mueller probe, about Trump personally, I think his chances of being impeached in the Senate are about 0.
I also don’t think, without that explicit damning evidence against Trump personally, that all dems are going to vote to impeach in the house. Pelosi and Schumer seem shy about the subject, and dems in red areas need to watch their back. And how many explicit “never Trumper” republican politicians are there nowadays? Even Romney did a 180.
Trump has shown that he will weasel out of any situation he thinks is unfavourable to him, at least any in which a weasel option exists. I think impeachment proceedings would therefore probably be a waste of time, unless that’s merely used as the prelude to a criminal trial.
It depends on what the lone nut does, and how the anti-Trump forces went searching for him.
Please tell me that, if some anti-Trump person or group, conspired to do something illegal to bring Trump down, that you would care. Suppose they got caught, as is almost inevitable. What effect would that have on the country? What effect would that have on the Democrats and/or never-Trumpers?
Suppose they got away with it. Is that how you want the country to be run?
There is a fair amount of complaining about how un-democratic the Electoral College is. ISTM that a criminal conspiracy is even less so. If progressives/Democrats/never-Trumpers have the votes in the House, then impeach him. If they have the votes in the Senate, then remove him from office.
If they don’t, and they start looking for a 2018 version of Lee Harvey Oswald, then they need to be arrested, given a fair trial, and then hanged for conspiracy to commit murder.
The Senate could choose to meet in secret to hear the evidence; they could appoint a select committee of sitting Senators to review the evidence and then report to the rest of the members; they could appoint a committee of non-Senators who have top-secret security clearances and take that group’s word for it; they could put all the evidence in one room and let the Senators in one-by-one to review it; they can throw it into the lap of the Chief Justice to decide what is or isn’t admissible. . .
In other words, the Senate is not bound by the same rules as a court of law and they can deal with national security issues. In fact, they do it every day.
There’s tons of evidence in the public domain for both collusion and obstruction. Enough to convict in a court of law (as distinct from an impeachment trial)? That’s a different question. But “no evidence” is bullshit.
People mention the Mueller probe. I tend to think that if there were anything REALLY damming in that thing, they would have put out something by now. It has been over a year. I think they are still trying to find something that will make it damming.
It is not that I think Trump is innocent. Everything they have found so far is too minor to make a real difference.