They had the House for 6/8 years of Obama’s presidency and the Senate+House for 2/8 of those years.
They never held enough of a majority to try. Here’s a list of 13 times Republican politicians suggested impeaching Obama.
I fully believe Republicans when they say they’re going to weaponize impeachment now and in the future. The stuff they accuse others of doing is just pre-emptive justification for them doing the same, and worse.
Constitutionally, it requires fewer Congressional votes to impeach and remove from office the President than it does to override a veto. Congress is the Article I branch and while the other branches claim co-equality, the only check on Congressional power is its own discipline, or lack thereof.
They’re no longer a political party. They are unfit to be trusted with the affairs of the nation. The voter suppression alone is enough proof they are dishonorable.
Where did my sig go?
The Republicans are weaponizing every conceivable political mechanism, within our outside of the Constitution, that they possibly can. They will continue to do so until they are no longer rewarded for their behavior by the voting public. The solution is not for the side that cares about the Constitution to abdicate its constitutional responsibilities. The solution is having enough voters who wake up and understand their role in a democratic Republic, instead of just cynically playing along with the current state of dysfunction and complaining about how detached from their lives politicians are.
I won’t hold my breath, though. The sad, ugly truth, as I have pointed out over and over again over the objections of those who accuse me of being a “chicken little” is that we are at the crisis stage. Democracy cannot function when you have different factions who literally experience different realities and perceive different truths. There was another time when two different factions experienced different realities and different truths: 1850 - 1876.
Well said. It’s two very different sides unable to understand how persons on the other side could possess the opposite view. Because they cannot conceive of a “good” person holding a view so radically opposed to theirs the people on the other side must be “evil.”
I agree with the article. I think both sides will be more likely to use impeachment in the future.
At that time, the Whigs split into their good and evil factions with the good becoming the Republicans. That’s what would need to happen now to keep a functioning democracy alive. That only happened during the Civil War because the Whig party was literally split in two by secession and the southern Whigs lost all political authority.
Times are different now. Of course the battle lines of the old Confederacy are still there, and white supremacy still reigns, but the political power balance is a lot closer to even. Also state militias are a lot more intertwined with the US military than they used to be, so I wouldn’t expect an outright military conflict. More like a gradual soft dissolution where states give the middle finger to the federal gov’t on court decisions and policy decisions, and the feds respond by withholding funds until eventually there’s no real union.
I think the risk is not as bad at they think. After Clinton was impeached, the Democrats did not try to impeach Bush and the Republicans did not try to impeach Obama.
If the public wants impeachment, as it appears they do today (by a thin but still real margin), then they’ll probably get impeachment, at least as long as the House is a different party from the WH. But it wasn’t principle or honor that stopped the Republicans from trying to impeach Obama – it was that Obama didn’t do anything remotely close to impeachable, and the public had no interest at all in impeaching him. If Obama had done even a tiny fraction of the dishonest and borderline illegal things Trump has done, he would have been impeached in a heartbeat.
Um, there was plenty of interest among Republicans in impeaching Obama, but not among a majority of the general public:
It’s true that Obama didn’t do anything remotely close to impeachable, but that didn’t stop a majority of Republicans from wanting to impeach him. It seems entirely plausible that a majority of Republicans (at least in the Republican Party’s current incarnation) will continue to want to impeach any Democratic president in the future, irrespective of whether said Democratic president has actually done anything impeachable, and irrespective of whether Democrats try to impeach any future Republican president.
Republicans whining that Democratic efforts at impeachment are nothing but blind partisanship unrelated to principle are simply trying to duck responsibility for nominating and electing the egregiously impeachable Trump. “Well you woulda done the same to any of our guys even if he wasn’t shitty” is how they try to avoid acknowledging how uniquely shitty the guy they chose is.
This doesn’t conflict with what I wrote.
So the gist of this is that the Republicans are going to use political processes in a cravenly shit-heeled and hypocritical manner to fuck with Democrats? Just like they’re doing right now?
The worst case scenario for Republicans is that any of this plays out in Trump’s favor. It’s okay to ask for foreign interference to get dirt on your opponent? Thanks, let’s see what we can dig up on Trump’s overseas investments and what his fucking kids are doing with daddy’s money and influence. If Trump wins by normalizing cheating then that will be the new normal and I am sure Democrats will be able to figure out how use it, as distasteful as it may be to them at first.
The police are corrupt, we know they’re corrupt, we have video of the police chief taking a bribe to order his guys to let a case go, video of the drug police settling what they confiscate, etc.
They’re investigating the murder of the mayor and have pinned it on her lover, James. There’s a lot of evidence in the case and no real doubt that the police have come to the wrong conclusion.
James shouldn’t go free. The corruption shouldn’t be allowed to persist.
These are two separate matters that should both be tackled, separately, and put to right.
That won’t actually happen though.
Dems are under attack enough without giving the gop legitimate grounds. Republicans would at that point accuse the Dems of being hypocritical (while of course being hypocritical themselves).
And, regardless of what happens next, it would fuel the “both sides” narrative – which right now is nonsense, but if it ever becomes true we’re all royally fucked.
From the outside, sometimes it looks like the United States is evolving into a parliamentary democracy, with impeachment serving as a de facto vote of no confidence.
nm
Yeah, it’s a little strange that the developing narrative seems to be “what precedent does it set if impeaching the president for a crime works in the dems favor” as opposed to “what precedent does it set if the president commits a crime and faces no consequences.”
Clinton was impeached because it was the beginning of the new troll Republican party, thanks to Gingrich–unprincipled, craven, morally bankrupt because their only concern was staying in office at any cost to the country. When Pelosi became House Speaker, she adamantly rejected the notion of impeaching Bush over the war in Iraq, because she believed there were no grounds for doing so.
With Trump there are grounds for impeachment, and there have been from very early on.
This total bullshit “both sides do it” conceit is how the Republican party puts up cover for what it does, which is mostly just clinging to power, at the expense of anything else–not making the country better. When they push that, the public gives up trying to hold anyone accountable, because it seems impossible. It’s all spin. The party is a spin machine now, and nothing more. They didn’t even try to defend Trump’s actions–they just used the process as a PR gimmick.
Impeachment will only become “a new norm” if electing corrupt, purely self-serving morally bankrupt presidents becomes a “new norm.” Right now, it’s only the Republican Party that seems willing to do that.
This is what my thought was during Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal.
Back in the day, when Kennedy or another president fooled around on their wives the press would ignore it and the other party didnt push it. Well that all changed.
Now with Trump you cant tell me other presidents havent tried to use another country for political influence but that wasnt such a big deal. Presidents were expected to make personal deals.
But now the threshold is low and whoever takes over from day one you will hear “Impeachment”.
I agree the world would have been a better place if we’d nailed Nixon’s balls to the walls when he interfered in the Vietnam peace talks of 1968, or if we’d sent Reagan to jail for interfering in the Iranian hostage negotiations. Maybe, maybe, the threshold for this kind of bullshit has been too low for too long.
But it kinda sounds like you’re saying “my guy should have gotten away with this.”