And just how, pray tell, can Congress remove a president because he’s incompetent? If there was a way to do so, Trump should have been out of office before the end of January 2017.
And only one side is saying something that is consistent with what the law actually says. Just because you don’t like a law, doesn’t mean that you get to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Laws don’t work that way.
Impeachment can be for any cause Congress wants it to be. Don’t we all know that by now?
(The right to abortion comes under constructive due process, btw).
I should probably have said in the first post that the reason they were giving is that it’s illegal. Point being, they are not simply ignoring Congress’s demand but claiming that they may not legally fulfil that demand.
I still think it’s extremely likely that the Supremes will side with Trump and the DOJ, and the demand will, in fact, turn out to be illegal.
Yes, you probably should have. But of course, if all you’re doing is relaying what Mnuchin has said, then that doesn’t really add much to the conversation that we couldn’t all read for ourselves in pretty much any news coverage of the topic.
That’s all well and good, obviously others disagree. At best, we’ve got a president who claims he did nothing wrong, but refuses to release exculpatory evidence to the oversight committee in violation of an apparently lawful request, and is prepared to take this refusal all the way to the supreme court in order to avoid having to clear his name. How Trump comes out of this looking better than congress is beyond me.
Indeed. From an analyst after the questioning of Cohen about Trump’s creative valuation of his properties:
"“Fundamentally, this is a question of Trump’s attitude toward taxes,” says Steve Rosenthal, senior fellow for the Urban–Brookings Tax Policy Center. “Does he believe that taxes are a shared responsibility? Or does he believe that taxes are a game of hide and seek?”
And now we know the answer to that question, directly from Trump himself. Paying taxes is “a sport”, one that presumably you can cheat to win at, just like Trump does with golf.
Are you aware that the Supreme Court found that forcing Americans to testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee to interrogate them about possible Communist sympathies was found to be a “legitimate legislative purpose?”
On your scale of legitimate purposes, where does routine oversight of tax laws as they apply to the President rank in relation to a witch hunt for Communists? It sounds like lower, but I just want to be sure.
leg·is·la·tive
/ˈlejəˌslādiv/
adjective
having the power to make laws.
“the country’s supreme legislative body”
synonyms: law-making, law-giving, judicial, juridical, jurisdictive, parliamentary, congressional, senatorial, deliberative, governmental, policy-making, administrative; rarelegislatorial
“a legislative assembly”
relating to laws or the making of them.
“legislative proposals”
relating to a legislature.
There is no “non-legislative” activity in congress. It all has to do with lawmaking. We haven’t written the laws yet, but does anyone doubt that the turnp administration will necessitate future lawmaking?
I fully support your efforts to see Warren G. Harding’s tax returns. It could be the break the Eugene V. Debs campaign needs!
Regards,
Shodan
A parody of “Rainy Day Women ♯12 & 35” is in there somewhere…
It’s good to finally see you supporting presidential accountability. What brought you around?
He is laboring under the impression that Harding was a Democrat.
Musta been a Fox chyron.
My scale of legitimate purposes is entirely irrelevant here, as is yours. It’s the opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court judges that matters here, and as it stands they will almost certainly find for Trump and the Republicans if there’s a fig leaf of precedent to hide behind (and quite possibly even if there isn’t).
It was the aftermath of the HUAC situation that lead to the Supreme Court decision I referred to earlier, which placed limits on Congressional investigations, including that their job is not to investigate crimes.
My opinion, ultimately, is that Congress should not be investigating allegations of crimes, and that it has avenues open to removing an unacceptable or incompetent President without needing to do so, and that any protections that President has against investigation or prosecution will end when that happens. The problem is, Congress does not agree that the President is unacceptable or incompetent.
As for your actual question, as to which is worse, there’s not much difference. In both cases, those being investigated were accused of being traitors with ties to Russia. The problem with HUAC is that it kept catching people who weren’t communists, not with it’s stated purpose.
Hold up. If the president commits “high crimes and misdemeanors”, and the house chooses to impeach him for those crimes, how on earth will they do that without investigating allegations first?
He comes out of this looking good to his supporters because he is getting one over on “the man”, or trying to. Sadly, those supporters don’t realise that Trump is now part of the group they see as “the man”, and before that did far worse things than they do.
Trump is a terrible President and a terrible human being, that will get very little argument on this board. But in America as a whole, there’s a huge amount of people who disagree. And if you want to successfully oppose them, or even understand what’s happening, simply classing their worldview as beyond you won’t cut it.
I’ll link again to the aricle from earlier, which goes into detail about this, but the short answer is that impeachment is not a criminal sanction, and so isn’t treated the same - but Congress has made clear that this is not an impeachment investigation.
In the specific case of Trump, Congress has the right to investigate whether he should be impeached, but does not have the right to take on the role of the executive or the judiciary and launch a criminal investigation simply because it doesn’t like the jandling of the Mueller report. The main difference being that its oversight function is fundamentally negative - that is, it can remover someone by impeachment, but can’t actively compel the exectutive to investigate something, or the judiciary to rule on it, and nor can it usurp those functions. It’s supposed to be a check on the powers of the other branches, not a right to bring those powers in house.
By precedent and history, it’s incredibly common for congress to investigate possible wrongdoing by the executive branch. Nothing congress is doing currently is unusual, in terms of investigations into Trump and his world.
I’m not clear what incredibly thin line you’re trying to walk here. Congress must investigate allegations in order to impeach, but you’re saying they can’t do so unless they decide at the outset that it’s an “impeachment investigation?” I’m not sure the government works that way.