Will the Fervor to Impeach Donald Trump Start a Democratic Civil War?
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.”
.. 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
.. the President appears to be in ever-greater legal peril from dual investigations, one led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the other by federal prosecutors in New York.
.. Trump supporters seem to welcome a fight over the issue. “If the Democrats move for impeachment, I think they are playing right into the hands of the President,” Anthony Scaramucci
.. “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.
.. “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.”
.. When I was Speaker, people wanted me to impeach George Bush for the war in Iraq because it was based on false information, but you can’t just go from one impeachment to the next. When we are in the majority, we are going to try to be unifying, and there is no way to do impeachment in a bipartisan way right now.
.. fifty-two per cent of American voters oppose impeachment
.. seventy-one per cent of Democrats already favor impeachment.
.. For roughly the first two centuries of the American republic, there was an informal taboo on advocating for impeachment, even among a President’s most outspoken critics.
.. Though he was Abraham Lincoln’s Vice-President and successor, Johnson was a Democrat, and he resisted the Republican Reconstruction in the South. Republicans used impeachment as a form of revenge, which only reinforced the taboo.
.. “The reason we are seeing more demands for impeachment is the rise in partisanship. Our partisan divisions now are not just sharp but among the sharpest in American history,”
.. Cohen’s indictment has five counts.
- The first charges Trump with obstruction of justice, based largely on Comey’s account of how the President tried to restrain the Russia investigation and then fired Comey when he would not oblige.
- The second count, referring to Trump’s business interests, including his hotels, asserts that he violated the foreign-emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bars federal officeholders from receiving payments from foreign governments. In a similar vein,
- the third count asserts that Trump directed federal money to his businesses and hotels domestically.
- The fourth count charges him with abuse of power for his criticisms of federal judges and for his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, in Arizona.
- The final count claims that Trump undermined the First Amendment by repeatedly attacking the news media.
.. “By firing Comey and waging war on the special counsel, Trump has become the master of obstructing justice,”
.. Trump’s threats against Attorney General Jeff Sessions; Rod Rosenstein, Sessions’s deputy; and Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I. Raskin said, “It’s only because we’re waist-deep in the Trump era that we forget how completely radical and beyond the pale it is to have the President directly threatening the people who are involved in a criminal investigation of him.”
.. Raskin cited the many foreign guests with business interests before the Administration who have stayed at the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, as well as the business deals conducted by the President’s sons overseas.
.. “We’ve had the Secret Service and other agencies spend millions of dollars at Trump hotels and resorts already,”
.. Nadler asked whether Trump intended to live on the hundred-and-fiftieth floor of the new building, and Trump replied that he did. “And I realized what this was all about,” Nadler said. “He wanted to be the highest man in the world.”
.. “If you’re going to remove the President from office, you are in effect in one sense nullifying the last election,” he told me. “What you don’t want are recriminations for the next twenty years—‘We won the election,’ ‘You stole it.’
.. And to do that you have to have a situation where some appreciable fraction—not a majority, but an appreciable fraction—of the people on the other side will grudgingly admit by the end of the proceedings that ‘Yeah, they really had to do it.’ ”
.. “The fact that someone has committed an impeachable offense doesn’t always mean that you should impeach him,”
.. With Nixon, having an enemies list and using the elements of the federal government to destroy your enemies was about the abuse of government power.
.. Not a single Democrat on the committee voted in favor of Clinton’s impeachment.
.. If the Democrats go in that direction, they are likely to learn a lesson that we learned in 1998. Even if the country starts out with you, they get sick of the process pretty quickly.”