# Should They Have Removed Pres. Reagan From Office? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 21, 2018, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996 "2018-08-21T18:41:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2018, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/21 "2018-08-25T17:57:36Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Seriously? Iran Contra specifically flouted the power of Congress. It got people killed, yes only Nicaraguans. I know Trump sucks but get some perspective. Perspective is the right word. I said “seem almost quaint”. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2018, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/22 "2018-08-25T21:06:11Z")
Should Reagan have been impeached? Reagan stated to the country, “Mistakes were made.” Now that’s a pretty weak admission of guilt. The passive voice was noted at the time. But what Reagan was _not_ doing was placing himself above or outside the law, at least after he was caught. To do so would have been a threat to our democracy. Iran/Contra violated procedure; if congress simply looked the other way it would encourage future administrations to enter pointless wars without congressional approval, presenting them with _fait accomplis_. Which administrations tend to do anyway. But while it’s serious, it doesn’t strike at the heart of democracy. Patriots could reasonably censure the Reagan administration while opposing impeachment. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2018, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/23 "2018-08-26T22:43:00Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > Versus allowing another country to interfere in our elections? Quaint. Versus allowing that same country to hack into our infrastructure and financial institutions? Quaint. Breaking the emoluments clause so many times it may as well not be in the document? Quaint. Breaking treaties, in ways minor and major. Quaint. Separating children from their parents and putting them in “camps”. Quaint. > > Reagan was wrong, but Trump makes him look like a schoolboy who took a lolly. Trump’s banana republic shenanigans are stupid, but arming Central American death squads is beyond quaint. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2018, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/24 "2018-08-26T22:53:00Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > The is an incoherent assertion: “…they did have enough evidence to remove President Ronald Reagan from office. Look it up.” > > “Enough evidence,” is meaningless in the sense that Congress needs no particular threshold of evidence to impeach and convict. > > I often argue that as a political reality, though not as a legal necessity, Congress must have sufficient evidence of a crime committed by the President. If you adopt that view, again your statement fails, because that was not present. > > Perhaps you meant merely that you’re confident that such evidence would have emerged if an impeachment investigation had been begun. Obviously that’s a defensible opinion, but one that can’t really be supported by “looking it up.” > > So my answer to your poorly framed question is “No.” Your post seems to argue that Congress had full rights to remove Reagan, but then you finish by saying, “So they shouldn’t have.” Your conclusion doesn’t seem to follow from your argument. If we remove the “so”, then it’s fine. You’re making a statement, without any backing information. But with the “so”, it is implying that you feel like the previous material had somehow backed your statement, and either I’m failing to see what that is or you had a brain fart and forgot to include it. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2018, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/25 "2018-08-26T22:56:22Z")
One of the most important tenets of our country is that there is nothing higher than the rule of law. If Congress made a law that the government was not to give money to the Contras, and Reagan ordered the Executive branch to do so anyways, then he was breaking the law and should have been removed. Really, the only defense would be that the law had a loophole and the Reagan Administration successfully exploited it. I doubt that they did so. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/26 "2018-08-27T08:11:13Z")
If every president who “deserved” to be impeached were impeached, we’d be at POTUS 100# or 150# by now. Impeachment should be an exception, not the norm. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/27 "2018-08-27T10:45:38Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > If every president who “deserved” to be impeached were impeached, we’d be at POTUS 100# or 150# by now. > > Impeachment should be an exception, not the norm. In the case of the OP though, it would have been the 25th Amendment, not impeachment. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/28 "2018-08-27T20:18:44Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > If every president who “deserved” to be impeached were impeached, we’d be at POTUS 100# or 150# by now. > > Impeachment should be an exception, not the norm. And they’d behave better if they knew impeachment was a real possibility. Why make the President above the law? ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/29 "2018-08-30T17:32:25Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > If every president who “deserved” to be impeached were impeached, we’d be at POTUS 100# or 150# by now. > > Impeachment should be an exception, not the norm. Yes, yes and once you appoint someone CEO or President of a corporation, it should be a for a fixed term, and not at all dependent on his performance. Totally unfair snark on my part. True, robust institutions have ways of getting rid of incompetent leaders. In other countries, they use votes of no-confidence. We should too. But we don’t. That’s not the way our system is set up. And if we try using the impeachment process for these purposes, we open the door to all manner of mischief, like removing a President from office because he receives oral sex from an intern in a consensual relationship. So I actually agree with Velocity. But I opine our system of government is antiquated and needs overhaul. Make it resemble other democracies, with party leaders and the like. To the extent that our system worked, it relied upon norms, which the GOP has blasted apart since about 1990. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/30 "2018-08-30T18:28:56Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Yes, yes and once you appoint someone CEO or President of a corporation, it should be a for a fixed term, and not at all dependent on his performance. > Totally unfair snark on my part. True, robust institutions have ways of getting rid of incompetent leaders. In other countries, they use votes of no-confidence. We should too. But we don’t. That’s not the way our system is set up. And if we try using the impeachment process for these purposes, we open the door to all manner of mischief, like removing a President from office because he receives oral sex from an intern in a consensual relationship. He wasn’t impeached for that. He was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. He was also guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. He shouldn’t have been impeached for that, in my opinion, but let’s get the facts correct. ---
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/31 "2018-08-30T20:12:29Z")
I was under the impression that [VP George Bush](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/09/24/bush-out-of-the-loop-on-iran-contra/4ee467ab-8531-46e5-8da5-ff7bd97a6609/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.dcfe020f433f) was the point person for Iran Contra. I actually don’t think it’s hard to believe that Reagan was really out of the loop (whether intentional or otherwise). > [@Cited article](#): > > In 1984, 1985 and 1986, Bush regularly attended key Reagan administration meetings on secret aid to the contras, some of it meant to circumvent a congressional ban, or meetings on covert arms sales to Iran, intended to gain release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon and create an opening to the Tehran regime. > > He also attended three White House meetings in November 1986 that Iran-contra prosecutors working for independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh have concluded set the stage for an attempted coverup of one particular set of Hawk missile shipments to Iran in 1985. > > Moreover, Bush while vice president developed a working relationship with Oliver L. North, the National Security Council aide who was the key mover-and-shaker in Iran-contra. North’s daily diary notes of that period contain numerous references to Bush and Bush’s aides in the context of Iran-contra operations. Hundreds of pages of North’s notebooks were released in 1990 in response to a lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute, and Public Citizen, a public interest group. Shouldn’t the question be whether this should have been an investigation that involved the GHW Bush administration that followed Regan? ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996/32 "2018-08-30T21:15:20Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > I was under the impression that [VP George Bush](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/09/24/bush-out-of-the-loop-on-iran-contra/4ee467ab-8531-46e5-8da5-ff7bd97a6609/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.dcfe020f433f) was the point person for Iran Contra. I actually don’t think it’s hard to believe that Reagan was really out of the loop (whether intentional or otherwise). > Shouldn’t the question be whether this should have been an investigation that involved the GHW Bush administration that followed Regan? God no. Just because they send 2nd banana to the meetings in order to allow plausible deniability doesn’t mean you have to play along. Where does the buck stop? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-they-have-removed-pres-reagan-from-office/819996.md?page=1)