Just what I came in to say. Not only should the Democrats do everything in their power to get rid of that self-centered idiot, Republicans should too. *Anybody *who gives a token shit about the United States should.
Word
I think when Russian ties or at least a cover up are proved, then Trump will be pardoned by Pence. I also think it’s highly likely that Pence will go down the same path.
Gawd, what a constitutional crisis. It’s clear Russia tried to tip the scales. It sure seems like some of Trump’s team was involved. It seems more clear that there is a cover up that goes to Trump. So, the order of succession still goes to the Republicans who benefited from Russia tipping the scales. There is no do over in the constitution. I am also highly opposed to moving the goalposts after the fact as once moved what’s to prevent the next wanna be despot emperor man child from doing the same.
I still prefer Pence, who Iis at least nominally same although I abhor him with the flame of a thousand suns, over Trump.
To accept Trump is to let the US of A go down in flames.
Part of me loves seeing the Republicans spending so much time and political capital defending the senile old fool but I know it’s going to be dangerous to let it go on much longer.
At least President Pence knows how to fly the plane. I HATE the place he’s taking us. I want to go somewhere in the opposite direction. And I hate being stuck flying PenceAir. But I’m pretty sure the plane will land safely, then we can figure out how to move it someplace good.
But the Internet Comments Section Come To Life is convinced he’s the best pilot ever, even though he has no idea how to fly plane. And he won’t let anyone that knows about planes into the cockpit,
But he invites his friend in and let’s them help him guess how the plane works.
So better to spend a few more years getting rid of a Pence so we can move the plane than it is to spend generations scraping it off the side of a mountain. And we’re all stuck on the plane.
As others have said, the damage Trump is doing to the United States far outweighs the damage he is doing to the Republican Party.
I have to say there’s some appeal in letting Gang Trump have 2-3 more years to incriminate themselves. The possibility of having Kushner & Pence under indictment in late 2018 sounds very tempting. We don’t want to risk leaving the seeds of a Le Pen-like dynasty fermenting in Ivanka. Surely she’s broken enough rules selling investor visas or other sorts of grift.
I don’t think that works. From Article I, Section 3:
Once he’s out, he’s out, and can’t get back in.
As to the OP, I certainly join the consensus that Trump is utterly and dangerously unfit to hold “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States”, and the Democrats have a patriotic duty to work to get him out, as tempting as it might be to want him to stick around and continue hurting the Republicans. (Not that the Democrats currently have any actual power over the issue one way or the other.)
I would say that if Trump is removed or resigns–perhaps especially if things get so bad that it happens early and with Republicans as well as Democrats acting–the Democrats should absolutely do their level best to hang Trump around the neck of hypothetical-President Pence, and the whole Republican Party. “You agreed to be that man’s running mate!” and “He was from your party! The Republicans are the ones who got our great country into this mess!” (If it’s basically the Democrats who take Trump down after some hypothetical 2018 midterm landslide–albeit it would still take some Republican support in the Senate in even the rosiest of Democratic scenarios–I think it would be easier to cripple the ensuing Pence Presidency and then finish him off in the 2020 elections.)
That’s optional, though. Removal is automatic on conviction, but disqualification is a separate vote. I can’t imagine that a Senate with enough votes to remove Trump wouldn’t disqualify him, but it has happened in lesser impeachments. Alcee Hastings is in Congress today because he wasn’t disqualified when he was removed from his federal judgeship.
And as far as I know, the issue of someone resigning to avoid the impeachment trial has never really been dealt with. Can they convict and disqualify someone who resigned the day before? Maybe.
So what you’re saying, OP, is that democrats should put party before country?
The way I read that is this is the maximum that a Senate could do to a sitting president. It might be possible that they could remove from office but not disqualify from future office. So I think he could be kicked out and run again in 2020, hopefully as a 3rd party which of course would put even Anthony Weiner in the White House.
A Canadian here.
I understand that it feels like Trump poses a serious threat to the United States and its institutions. He is completely unpredictable and none of us can be sure he won’t nuke somebody.
But hear me out for a moment:
I’m a liberal like many of you. I live in Toronto, Ontario. We used to have a mayor you may have heard of, Rob Ford. He was a loose cannon who had no actual policies beyond cutting the budget of anything he could get his hands on, who might have been using drugs on the job, who had bizarre grudges against things that weren’t actually problems (who hates libraries, anyway?) and who was, in many ways, a sort of early prototype for the kind of appeal Trump harnessed (“self made” businessman who inherited money, nativist, incoherent, etc). I was not a fan.
At the same time, we had a Prime Minister who was not crazy, who did not do drugs, who had actual policies, who hid his nativism for the most part (and the nativism of his party) and who generally seemed very professional. I did not like his policies but thought I respected him due to his professionalism.
Who did more damage to my country? Well, obviously the Prime Minister as a mayor can’t do much. But, the thing is, all Rob Ford really did in Toronto was screw up our transit even more (which is a long tradition in Toronto and hardly a unique accomplishment). Stephen Harper, our Prime Minister, waged active war against Canada’s democratic institutions, but he was so boring about it that most people didn’t care. Ford was constrained in ways that Trump is not (or may not be, though should be), as Toronto’s city council is in no way comparable to the relationship of powers in the US federal government, but I want to suggest that it might be preferable to have an unpredictable loose cannon and his comedy of errors than a competent force for evil.
The current federal government of Canada has done very little to repeal the many awful pieces of legislation that Stephen Harper implemented while Prime Minster (that’s on them, sure, but there is also lots of legislation to repeal), whereas Toronto is dealing with not too bad of a legacy from Ford. If Trump’s buffoonery can be limited to domestic bungling, maybe it’s preferable to have him instead of Pence. All of this is moot if he fires missiles at the wrong country, or insults the wrong country, or what have you.
I understand my comparison isn’t really fair: Ford had far less power than even a governor has and Harper was far less far right than Pence, but it’s just a thought: the buffoon may not follow through on much.
No less an expert than Ronald Reagan (okay, okay, it’s his son) says he should be removed from office. Ron Reagan is in my opinion about 100x smarter than his dad. I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.
To add onto what Reagan said in his clip, this isn’t a time for partisan ship. We have an emotionally unstable, irrational, petty little toddler with his finger on the nuclear button. The future of civilization is at stake. If we care about humanity or the planet, we can’t play strategic games thinking that we’re better off keeping him on until 2021 just to help us electorally in 2018 and 2020. That is a risk we can’t afford. He needs to be removed now, preferably in handcuffs. If the price is long term electoral losses, that’s a price I would gladly pay to remove this threat to the planet.
Well, gosh, I’d love to get cancer, if only it wouldn’t make me so sick and perhaps kill me. After all, then I’d cash in my critical illness insurance and get time off work.
Baloney.
You can construct a political hypothesis for why Pence would be way WORSE than Trump for the GOP, starting with the extraordinarily obvious fact that he is a worse candidate for President in 2020. After all, he wasn’t even a candidate in 2016. Trump won an election he had no business winning; Pence, were it not for Trump, would still be largely unknown. Trump commands a cult of personality that has tens of millions of Americans in its thrall, willing to alter their very definition of reality to suit his tweets; Pence, as near as I can tell, has no personality, and so will not built a cult of it.
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We used to have a mayor you may have heard of, Rob Ford.
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I said this in another thread but will again; the comparison to Rob Ford is just ridiculous. It does not work at all, sorry.
Rob Ford was a buffoon in over his head, but he was the fucking MAYOR of a city; his fame was vastly greater than his influence. He was the mayor of a city structured in such a way that the mayor does not actually do a lot. At no time was Rob Ford one of the 500 most important people in Canada. It would not be possible for anyone who has ever lived to significantly alter the course of the City of Toronto as mayor, good or bad. The President of the United States is the most important person in the world, with the literal ability to kill a few billion people and destroy civilization if he feels like doing so or just stumbles into it. His economic policies can cause Canada’s economy to crater. In fact, it might be accurate to say that the President of the United States has a greater influence on the lives of Torontonians than their own mayor does.
Insofar as Ford exercised his very limited power, while he was a fool, he was at least a veteran city councillor who understood the apparatus of the government he was in charge of, and who in his heart really wanted to make his city better. Trump is an evil, sociopathic parasite who has no intention whatsoever of helping his fellow citizens and who sees the Presidency as a way to personally profit at the expense of his country, which he’d sell out to the highest bidder at the drop of a hat.
Nor do I for a minute understand the comparison between Stephen Harper, who for all the wailing about him was a boring, govern-from-the-middle moderate with few ideologically based policies of any significance at all, versus Mike Pence, who absolutely is a bigoted, evangelical jerk. But I’d trust Pence not to start a nuclear war, a global depression, or commit treason, and regrettably, one cannot say that of the current President.
The way I think of it is - My house is on fire, Trump/Pence/GOP are the fire, the fire needs to put out. It’s not enough that maybe my house is old, and maybe there are things I don’t love about my house, it’s still my house with all my shit in it and IT’S ON FIRE!
Do you try to put the fire out? Or do you stand back and say, “Well, if it burns down then I get all new stuff with the insurance money.”
YOU PUT THE DAMN FIRE OUT!
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!
Yeah, we put out the fire. No “burn, motherfucker, burn!” from me.
If the GOP decided now that the threat Trump represents to our national security, and the fact that if he hasn’t technically obstructed justice, it’s not for lack of trying - if they decided now that these things are more important than cutting taxes for the rich and gutting Obamacare right away, and they reacted accordingly and gave him the heave-ho before June was out, they’d have 16 months for their base to get past it, and for normal partisan divisions to reassert themselves (as opposed to a political landscape with Trump’s base on one side, and practically everyone else on the other side).
This would probably be the best political outcome for the GOP in 2018, and therefore the worst for the Dems. Best for the Dems, and worst for the GOP, is if this rolling disaster drags out through most of next year.
Fuck that shit. Trump’s a danger to the country, to our alliances, and to our national security, and a boon to the Russians who are trying to wage war against us on the cheap. The sooner he’s out, the better, and if that works out better for the GOP and worse for the Dems than if he stays, well, what’s more important?
He seems to be doing most of the work himself, so I’m unsure why the Dems shouldn’t put their oar in the water as well. 
The liberals and progressives have worked with conservative presidents in the past. So, I don’t see how Pence is or could be worse than Trump. Basically, regardless of Pence’s politics, he’s a standard politician, who plays by the rules and isn’t a complete loon or loose cannon. He’d be infinitely better FOR THE COUNTRY than Trump is.
No, it wouldn’t be better. If the Republicans start looking like they might seriously impeach Trump that means that he’s crossed the line so far and that public opinion has shifted so much that he’s in Nixon’s boat…it’s inevitable. If the Dems just stood by at that point or actively stopped the impeachment it would be political suicide…it would also be pointless and harmful. I can’t see how it benefits the Dems in any way or from any angle…what it does is help the Pubs who could say THEY were the noble ones who got rid of Trump despite Democratic interference. I’m sure you don’t have any ulterior motives in any of this, but I don’t think may Dems would be stupid enough to fall for this sort of thing.
In the same way that it would be prudent to cut your own throat rather than take that gift of several million dollars that you won in the lottery…
OK, let’s revise the timeline.
- Dems take the House in the 2018 elections.
- Jan 2019 D controlled house is seated and almost immediately starts making noise about impeachment.
- As impeachment noise gets louder, there is a lot of talk about whether or not Trump is going to be primaried. If Scott Walker sets foot in Iowa, CNN is there. If John Kasich takes a dump in New Hampshire, it’s all over the front of the NYT (ewww).
- April 2019 official impeachment proceedings look all but inevitable in the House. Furthermore some tier two Republican Presidential candidate (Santorum, Jindal, etc.) officially announces a 2020 bid.
- Now that there’s blood in the water the feeding frenzy starts. Tier one Republicans start announcing their candidacies while House Democrats are drawing up articles of impeachment.
- Trump resigns the presidency in order to focus on his 2020 bid full time.
- Trump runs essentially the same campaign. Build the wall. Drain the swamp. Ban muslims. Deport all illegal aliens.
- Trump voters vote for Trump again because in their minds all that stuff still needs doing. He wins the primary easily.
I don’t like the plan. If we’re to take him out, I want Republican prints on the knives. If impeachment passes the House with a slim Democratic majority, it will be seen as political. If you need Democratic votes to pass in the House, you sure as hell will need Republican votes to convict in the Senate. So unless and until Republicans are willing to do it, it won’t get done.
Of course I don’t have their best interests at heart. The opinion is quite clearly biased. The question is not.
So foreign that I actually posited it in the OP. Perhaps you missed that.