Being an embarrassing buffoon is not an impeachable offense. Trump is a symptom of a bigger problem.
Dems scream IMPEACHMENT if they think it will please their base and their donors for their next election.
That's all politicians care about now, because the system is built that way. And we don't seem to mind.
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Obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense. The Mueller report detailed multiple instances of obstruction...and that was violations ago. (The below
list of transgressions was two or three weeks worth of transgressions ago)
Because this week alone, the president has asked government workers to break the law to fulfill his requests, and noted that he will pardon them if they get in trouble; suggested hosting the next G-7 summit at his property (so that he can profit); and diverted funds from FEMA relief to his border fever dream. He’s also denying lifesaving medical care to immigrant children he will deport and changing citizenship rules for the children of military families born abroad. On the 25th Amendment front (meaning the “is he mentally unfit for office” front), the president has lied about his wife’s relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, garbled an answer about climate change in ways that would terrify anyone in search of a topic sentence, attacked Fox News for disloyalty, blamed Puerto Rico in advance of a hurricane for being in the path of a hurricane, and generally conducted himself in ways that bespeak grievously low functioning. This all comes on the heels of a week in which he approvingly quoted someone describing him as the second coming (a performance that would have sent most of us to the nearest psych ward), called his own economic adviser the enemy of the state, “ordered” American companies to stop investing in China, and got in a fight with Denmark over a real estate deal gone south in Greenland.
And what were other presidents impeached for?
Nixon
Article I: Obstruction of justice: in Nixon’s case, included efforts to delay, cover up, or conceal evidence relating to the Watergate break-ins by making false and misleading statements, withholding information, encouraging witnesses to give false or misleading statements, attempting to interfere with the FBI and other investigators, leaking information about the investigation to help the accused, and insinuating that people who refused to testify against him or who gave false testimony would gain favors.
Article II: Abuses of presidential power: misusing the FBI, Secret Service, and other government employees by allowing their information to be used for purposes other than national security or the enforcement of laws; using campaign contributions and the CIA in an attempt to sway the process; misusing executive power by interfering with agencies within the executive branch.
Article III: Defiance of subpoenas: involved Nixon’s willful disregard of subpoenas of, and failure to produce, papers and information for the House Judiciary Committee.
So, check, check, check.
Clinton
Article III: Obstruction of justice: determined that Clinton had prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, and that he had engaged personally, and through his subordinates and agents, in schemes designed to delay, impede, cover up, and conceal the existence of evidence and testimony related to a federal proceeding.
Again, check.
Andrew Jackson
Article X: “did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof, which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain, and to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted; and in pursuance of his said design and intent, openly and publicly and before divers assemblages of citizens of the United States, convened in divers parts thereof, to meet and receive said Andrew Johnson as the Chief Magistrate of the United States, did, on the eighteenth day of August, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and on divers other days and times, as well before as afterwards, make and declare, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby.” This is then followed by lengthy accounts of what could be polemical Trump rally
speeches (and also those not used at his rallies).
From Lawrence Tribe:
The case for impeaching and removing Trump to protect our republic from the irreversible injury likely to be inflicted by his ongoing “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is now so compelling that only the delusional—or those utterly ignorant of our Constitution’s sole mechanism for defending the country from a lawless tyrant—could fail to agree. The only real question is whether attempting to remove Trump by impeachment is so certain to fail, and to backfire by increasing the odds of his remaining in office for a second term, that the effort would be self-defeating. But that excuse for not doing what’s obviously right as a constitutional matter is no longer tenable even if it might once have been: An impeached Trump who escapes conviction in the Senate after the evidence is laid out in public House hearings will be weaker in 2020 than a Trump who can brag that not even a Democratically controlled House could bring itself to impeach him. And GOP Senators who give him a pass will be easier to defeat than ones who’re spared any need to be counted.
