I’m struggling to see how you could have thought that’s a fair way to frame it. The polling I cited was 34% for, 48% against. The article you just cited notes:
Though I agree with your conclusion, this is a five-point drop in one poll.
It’s been just six days since the Mueller Report was released; there haven’t been many good polls since. And per 538’s average, Trump’s approval-disapproval has gone from 42-53 a week ago, to 41.4 - 53.4 now. Right direction, but not a very big change so far.
And if the Mueller Report is allowed to disappear from the news, that may be all we get.
When one looks to popularity contests in order to determine what their personal moral path to take should be, “fairness” is an odd concept to toss out there as a defense of ones position.
Regardless of the point you’re trying to make (which seems to buttress my “we should do it because it’s right, not because it’s popular” argument, but whatever), it’s quite obvious that the historic popularity of Richard Nixon in 1972 was not, nor should have been, an impediment to his 1974 impeachment, though it may have appeared so at the time, to some observers.
The same goes for today. Or we should just give up on the country.
On the subject of polls and impeachment, the questions and results are all over the place. Take these two polls from March, both by pollsters of good reputation, with decent sample sizes.
Suffolk University, March 13-17: “From your own point of view, do you think the House of Representatives should seriously consider impeaching President Trump?” Yes: 28%, No: 62%
Monmouth University, March 1-4: “Do you think President Trump should be impeached and compelled to leave the presidency, or not?” Yes: 42%, No: 54%
Two fairly contemporaneous polls, and one finds only 28% support for the House “seriously consider[ing] impeaching President Trump,” while the other finds 42% support for his “be[ing] impeached and compelled to leave the presidency.” Whoa, dudes! 42% for removal, but only 28% for the House seriously considering the possibility.
That’s a pretty huge sampling error, like four standard deviations’ worth. What this really shows, IMHO, is that there’s a lot we don’t know about how people are interpreting these variations on this question.
First off, I’d like to apologize for flying off the handle last night. It was a cheap shot to reference your non-American status. (Do you happen to know anyone in the NZ immigration bureau, by the way? Asking for a friend…)
All available polling data indicate that the public aren’t in favor of impeachment, and there are lots of other issues people care about more. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that this could change if the Dems actively promote it. I don’t think it’s likely, but that’s just my opinion. Like I said, reasonable people may differ here.
My reference to criminal prosecution was in regard to your statement that
Well, actually, yeah, if you’re a smart prosecutor you might very well do that. You prosecute people you can get convicted, not people who you personally think committed crimes or people you just don’t like. How sympathetic the defendant is going to be in front of a jury is one of the factors you consider, if you’re any good at your job at all.
Perhaps I misinterpreted you. This is my impression or your argument, please point out where I am wrong:
Trump has indisputably committed serious crimes, in addition to being generally intellectually and morally unfit for office.
Therefore, it is Congress’ ethical duty to impeach him, even if the likely outcome of that impeachment is that Trump wins re-election.
The Bill Clinton references were intended to point out that, by that standard of “any President who breaks any law must be impeached”, Clinton also deserved to be impeached. Since that conclusion is ludicrous, the standard must be flawed.
But if I was mistaken in thinking that you held to that standard, then never mind.
The idea that the President shouldn’t be impeached without overwhelming public support is both an elementary principle of democracy and a Constitutional reality; you’re not going to get 67 votes in the Senate for anything that only 50.1% of the public want. If you find it “terrifying” that an impeachment should be reduced to a “popularity contest”, wait until you find out how we pick Presidents in the first place!
So, to answer your question, impeachment is for removing Presidents who the large majority of people find so odious that their continuing to hold office until the next scheduled election is intolerable. We’re not there right now; it’s to the eternal shame of the nation that we aren’t, but it’s the reality and we must face it.
Forgot to add: you admit you don’t know much about the Clinton impeachment, so I assume you don’t remember Watergate either, which is what makes it possible for you to believe wrongly that it would be possible to focus on bread and butter issues as well as impeachment. You can’t walk and sprint at the same time.
There are 235 House Dems, so it’s possible to split the work. They can let the Judiciary Committee handle the impeachment investigation, and let the rest of Congress deal with everything else.
Don’t try to tell me what I believe, especially when you can’t even make clear what you think that is. Are you asserting that the DoJ policy against indicting Presidents is unconstitutional?
I simply meant that impeachment is political in the sense that it can pretty much by definition only happen to unpopular Presidents. It is also legal in the sense that, although the Constitution doesn’t require any finding of criminal wrongdoing in order to impeach, it has always been understood in practice that such a finding is politically necessary. That’s why in the two cases of blatantly partisan impeachment efforts in American history (Johnson and Clinton) figleaves of legal pretext had to be used to justify the vote.
Wait. You don’t think we should start impeaching Trump? Yet you’re “pretty pro-impeachment”. You seem to get into a lot of argument that involve you defining words differently than most people.
I don’t think anyone here denies that we should start figuring out…well, I don’t think anyone here has any doubt about whether we should impeach him, and we all agree that every effort should be made to bring yet more evidence into the light in order to convince those who don’t currently agree with us. We don’t need to look at polls to justify those efforts, the 2018 election results are all the polls we need.
The only disagreement appears to be about the political wisdom of branding these efforts in the short term as “figuring out whether to impeach” or as multiple cases of “figuring out whether he did (insert obviously impeachable offense here)”
So this is just nitpicking pedantry based on the fact that the Constitution doesn’t actually require a finding of criminal wrongdoing for impeachment? Is that it?
Which may very well be what Donald Trump wants after all. Trump is probably terrified at the thought of endless congressional hearings on live television – that is how you get to impeachment if we ever get there. But I bet hardly a damn person knows much about the Mueller report itself. They don’t know the names. They don’t know the faces. They don’t know which way is up or down with that report. If progressives and critics of Trump thought they were disappointed already, then they’re going to be monumentally disappointed when they impeach and nothing happens.
Meanwhile, going straight to impeachment right now is probably going to do nothing other than lead us straight into tribal warfare, and I’ve got news for you all: that is something Donald John Trump does pretty fucking well. And I’ll tell you something else: he can be a lot more tribal and a lot more bellicose. A lot more. He can go deep down into the sewer with this, and given the fact that he is fighting for his political, economic, and personal survival, and that of his family, he will know few boundaries. There will be few rules.
He could start a race war. And he absolutely would if he felt it would keep him out of jail.
We’ve been lucky. At the last election we very nearly elected someone who was dumber than Trump. His party got more votes: but we have proportional representation here. And the party that held the balance of power decided to give that power to the “moderate left”. So we’ve been one of the few countries to fight against the rise of what I call the “authoritarian trend.” But that only happened because of the electoral system we adopted, and because the party that held the balance of power decided to “reject a modified status quo” and thought that "capitalism needed to “regain its human face”. It could have been so very very different.
My position is that this doesn’t matter. It simply isn’t relevant.
But that’s beside the point. It was an analogy. Nothing more.
The bolded is the part that you don’t understand.
I asked before: how are you determining likelihood? What metric are you using?
I hold the position that we can’t determine “likelihood.” The situation right now is just too chaotic and too fluid for anyone to be able to predict what the impact of impeachment will be. The news cycle can be as short as only a few hours. Things are so dynamic. Can you even tell me some of the things that happened last week? Do you remember when Sean Spicer wore an over-size suit? Didn’t that feel like 15 years ago? We can’t know what will happen in 2020. We barely can remember what happened yesterday. As I said before: you are trying to play 3D chess with someone who is snookering you.
If I summarised the position you hold as this: “Congress shouldn’t impeach, even if the more likely outcome of not impeaching would be that Trump wins re-election” wouldn’t you think that would be a disingenuous statement?
I don’t accept that impeachment would make it more likely that Trump will win. My gut feeling is that it will be more likely that Trump will loose. But I can’t quantify that “gut feeling”, so I haven’t centred my arguments around this.
So my position is that “the likelihood of Trump getting re-elected” is not a metric we should be using in determining whether or not to impeach. Congress should instead just do their jobs.
Well that isn’t my standard.
Okay then.
I know how you pick your Presidents. Its entirely fucked up. But you don’t need “overwhelming public support” to impeach. There is no mechanism for this. It isn’t how the system works.
This isn’t about “removal from office.” Its about “bringing the indictment.”
OK. I do think it is possible to make reasonable inferences about the likely consequences of the various options, but obviously the situation is highly unpredictable and volatile. If I agreed that there was no way to predict the likely political implications of impeachment, then sure, let’s have the default choice be doing the right thing.
The only “mechanism” which insures impeachment can’t happen without overwhelming public support is the requirement for a 2/3 majority in the Senate. Impeachment isn’t a special case, just an example of the general principle that democratic governments tend not to do things that are unpopular with voters, especially when supermajorities are necessary to do them.
Americans routinely use the word “impeachment” as shorthand for “impeachment by the House of Representatives, followed by conviction by the Senate and removal from office”. So yes, given the Democratic House majority, it is quite possible that Trump could be impeached in the narrow technical sense of the term. But the Republican Senate makes it effectively impossible for him to be impeached in the broader, and more commonly encountered in ordinary conversation, sense of the word. And of course impeachment is about removal from office, just like a criminal indictment is about sending someone to jail. It’s only one step in the process, but there’s no reason to take it unless you hope to see that process through to its conclusion.
It’s not about having enough congresspeople to do the procedural work. There’s constant work on 100s of issues going on all the time in Congress.
It’s about public messaging and political capital. If impeachment is going on, believe me all other news coverage will be dropped and the country will be breathlessly watching every move. Any positive policies or messaging about anything else will be lost in the furor, and the public perception will be that Congress cares more about impeachment then “solving real peoples’ problems” or whatever.
All true. Unfortunately, he’ll have about the same reaction to the prospect of losing re-election and no longer being able to obstruct investigations into his shenanigans. So not impeaching just kicks that can down the road until next year.
