Editor: Johnathan Meyers | Tactical Investor
Trump Impeachment Odds Continue Dropping
The billionaire Tom Steyer thinks so. He stars in TV ads calling for impeachment and has set up a “Need to Impeach” campaign to build national support for removing the president. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, doesn’t think so. She says talking about impeachment is “a gift to Republicans”. The former Senate majority leader Harry Reid also doesn’t think so. “I’ve been through impeachment,” he said, “and they’re not pleasant.”
So who is right?
In their terrific, accessible, and thoughtful new book, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and the constitutional lawyer Joshua Matz do better than offering a simple yes or no: they give us a framework for thinking about the question. Tribe and Matz argue that too many people think of impeachment as a mechanical process: if there are “high crimes and misdemeanours”, then there must be impeachment. They disagree. Instead, they argue that anyone thinking about impeachment needs to consider three critical questions: “Is removal permissible?”, “Is removal likely to succeed?”, and “Is removal worth the price the nation will pay?”.
But perhaps the greatest contribution of the book
Waiting to impeach also has serious risks. While Congress dilly-dallies, a president might continue to engage in dangerous behaviour that puts the nation at risk, and a president under the dark cloud of investigation might throw a Hail Mary (like starting a war) in order to boost his popularity. In addition, the simple fact of delay might acculturate people to the bad behaviour and in the process normalize the president’s conduct.
Unfortunately for members of Congress, this isn’t a Goldilocks story. Even if impeachment is warranted and even if they get the timing just right, impeachment is still risky. It locks up the White House and Congress in extensive proceedings, preventing them from addressing the nation’s pressing issues. It could potentially reshape the separation of powers, depending on the justifications for impeachment. Full Story
Trump Impeachment Odds: Don’t Fight The Trend
The fervour to Impeach Donald Trump Could Start a Democratic Civil War
Green, a Democrat, never supported Trump, although he also never imagined that he would be advocating his forced removal from office.
“I didn’t come to Congress to impeach a President,” he told me. “I came to Congress to negotiate the issues that I grew up with—poverty, housing—for the least, the last, and the lost.” But Green began contemplating Trump’s removal when the President fired James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in May 2017.
Three months later, when Trump equated white-supremacist protesters in Charlottesville with those who had rallied against them, Green decided to take formal action:
“That’s when I realized he was unfit to be President. He was converting his bigotry into American policy.” When the resolution came up for a vote, he said, “I did not lobby anyone, because, quite frankly, it’s a question of conscience.”
He pressed for the second vote after Trump referred to Haiti and other predominantly black nations as “shithole countries.” Green understood that his call for impeachment was symbolic, but he expressed satisfaction with the number of votes he received—nearly a third of the Democratic members of the House. “I concluded if but one person voted for this article, this would be the right thing,” he said. “And we are not finished.”
Trump Impeachment Odds: Trump Loves A Fight
“He doesn’t have Richard Nixon’s attention span or his O.C.D. about record-keeping. There are no e-mails or tapes. He didn’t do anything wrong on Russia, so he’ll be exonerated.” Scaramucci added, “You are dealing with a human Pac-Man. He’s the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life.”
Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the Newsmax Web site, who sees the President regularly at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, told me,
“The guy loves a fight and will see this one as easily winnable.”
Republicans believe a push for impeachment would likely be a disaster for the Democrats in the midterms. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist, told me, “Anger and fear drive off-year elections, and we are going to talk about how the Democrats want to shut us up by impeaching Trump when they couldn’t beat him in 2016. People are talking about the Republicans losing forty seats in the House, but if we make the election a referendum on impeachment we could break even or pick up a few.” Full Story
Elites have no one to blame but themselves for Trump’s rise
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”And so Charles Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities, an iconic read about how French and English elites faced the challenges of revolution and war. For American elites, A Tale should also resonate today. By every metric of wealth and power, elites live in the best of times. The top 10% of the U.S. population controls over 75% of the nation’s wealth, a figure not seen since the eve of the 1929 stock market crash. And a growing administrative state and the digital revolution have concentrated power and information control in ways that early Federalist elites would only envy.
Yet, listening to today’s elites, especially the dominant bien-pensant faction, we are in the worst of times. Elite discourse on Twitter and Facebook or in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, or the Washington Post, discloses tales of personal woe, looming fascism, nuclear war and, and threats from Hillary’s Clinton’s “basket of deplorable,” in which reside the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamaphobic.” Mrs Clinton put “half of Trump’s supporters” into this basket; based on the 2016 vote, they totalled 31.5 million people, once quaintly known as “my fellow Americans.
Political parties are increasingly unable to channel popular disdain for elites.
And that disdain is now bipartisan. Many of Bernie Sanders’s supporters believe that their candidate was cheated out of victory by moles posing as neutral DNC officials who acted on instructions from the Clinton campaign. Trump declared repeatedly that the election was rigged, and nothing his supporters have learned since about the FBI or DOJ has convinced them otherwise. Populist Republicans label their own legislative leaders as “cucks” while many Democrats deride their party leaders as “neoliberals.”
We could use an updating of Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation. The very things that make this the best of times for elites—the concentration of wealth and power, information control, a symbiosis between global corporations and expanding government, and the sometimes ruthless administrative state—have engendered a new form of alienation, that “they” no longer represent “us.” And any solution must begin with the recognition that, to paraphrase a prominent historian of Jacksonian America, we don’t live in the Age of Trump; rather, Trump belongs to our age. Full Story
Trump Impeachment Odds: Only 42 per cent of Americans support Impeachment
Almost the same proportion of Americans want to impeach President Donald Trump as the percentage who favoured impeaching Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal, according to a new CNN/SSRS poll.
The survey found that 42 per cent of Americans today think Trump should be impeached, compared with the 43 per cent who backed Nixon’s impeachment in March 1974. (When broken down by party, the support for impeachment is quite skewed, however. Seventy-seven per cent of Democrats say Trump should be impeached, while just 9 per cent of Republicans do.)
As CNN pointed out, this overall number is significantly higher than the roughly 29 per cent of Americans who supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 — and the roughly 29 per cent to 30 per cent of Americans who favoured impeachment of Barack Obama and George W. Bush during their presidencies.
The current number is also notable because support for Nixon’s impeachment did not gain this kind of momentum until after some of the biggest revelations about Watergate — a degree of scandal that Trump has yet to face, CNN noted. Nixon ultimately resigned before an impeachment vote. Full Story
Trump Impeachment Odds: There Are More Pressing Matters To Focus on
No president for the past 19 years has sought to offer any remotely sane budget. And with still relatively low-interest rates, massive federal spending, a $22 billion national debt, and an annual deficit of nearly $1 trillion, it is hard to imagine, in extremis, that there remains any notion of “stimulus” or “pump-priming” left.
Yet we hear little about such financial profligacy.
Not a word comes from Trump’s critics about the need for Social Security or Medicare reform to ensure the long-term viability of each — other than the Democrats’ promises to extend such financially shaky programs to millions of new clients well beyond the current retiring Baby Boomer cohorts who are already taxing the limits of the system.
To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next. Full Story
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Trump Impeachment Odds: Impeaching Trump is a bad idea
