Keep in mind Malathor is member of a party that impeached a sitting president for lying about consensual sex between adults.
As David Frum tweeted earlier today, great-grandfathers of America’s Founders hanged Charles I for treason and he tried invoking kingly ‘executive branch’ above-the-law status as a defense too. Didn’t work out so well.
This stuff is extremely Nixonian. Weird. I’m old enough to remember so-called conservatives shitting themselves just a few years ago over a president issuing EOs. Then it was all overreach and abuse of power. Today the same office can possibly collude with a foreign power hostile to western democracy itself and it’s all A-OK.
This is exactly correct. The check on the president is impeachment, a political process. There is no specific legal definition of what constitutes an impeachable offense (wtf is “high crimes and misdemeanors”, the constitution does not say). Congress can, on its own volition decide it has had enough and impeach for just about any trumped up charge it wants (Andrew Johnson is the perfect example of this). The only real limit is the need to get a majority of the house and 2/3 of the Senate to go along with it. It was not meant to be easy.
I always enjoy your posts, but it seems like I often have to play a guessing game to figure out which word you meant to use. Seems like autocorrect is failing you.
I usually picture you typing in a mad frenzy, typos be damned. :D
The point of the investigation is to establish whether Trump has done things wrong.
It’s totally possible that the GOP controlled Congress could ignore absolutely everything. To be honest, it seems like Malathor is already on board with that, and that Trump can quite literally do no wrong.
And at that point, the republic may be done. Our system of government was designed around the idea of the different branches providing competitive checks on each other.
It was not designed for a situation where partisan politics result in a case where the different branches no longer limit or check the power of the other two.
But we are now in a situation where people are openly advocating things which they admit are terrible, because they think it will gain them some short term political advantage.
But the reality is that “winning” doesn’t even mean anything anymore, because they no longer stand for any of the things they used to believe in.
In their desire to win, we’ve seen these people abandon everything. The road they are now driving on doesn’t lead anywhere they actually want to go. But all they care about is that their team is driving… And by the time they finally realize what they’ve done, it’ll be too late.
(Following Dowd’s lead, Gordon denies it and says he made up that plank all on his lonesome without consulting Trump. Of course, that account puts Gordon in the cross-hairs of the Mueller investigation.)
You can go back even father than that. The King of Kings of the Persian Empire wasn’t allowed to obstruct justice. Can we please not tear down the last 2500 years of the tradition of rule of law in our civilization just because one party doesn’t want to admit they elected a crook?
I would vote for Xerxes, Charles I, Andrew Johnson or the Reagan-Wraith over Trump in 2020. (To be fair, Charles I would probably be just as bad as Trump. But at least he’d be a Washington outsider - he’d shake things up!)
High Crimes and Misdemeanors was a well known legal “term of art” in 18th Century British common law, with a history of legal precedents going back to the 14th Century.
Most of the founders had at least some knowledge of the British common law at the time and the meaning of the phrase, in context, is crystal F’ing clear. If you want more info direct from the founders, read Federalist Papers 65.
perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct, and refusal to obey a lawful order.
Are there any items on this list that Trump hasn’t hit yet?