Hearing the Falconer #50 ~ 14-June-2019 ~ Should We Impeach Trump? **

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....
from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1919

The middle of the road is all of the usable surface.
The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

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14-June-2019:
This article makes the case for impeaching Trump: should we do it?
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If we just want to impeach every president we don't like, or every president we disagree with, that is too extreme in one direction.
If we think it is NEVER right to impeach a president that is too extreme in the other direction.
How can we find a smart and moderate position on impeachment?

Strictly speaking, there is only one thing we NEED to impeach: a majority of the votes in the House of Representatives. So that is our first rule for a smart and moderate position: to impeach you need the votes in the House. That rule comes straight out of the Constitution.

But even if we have the votes in the House we should not impeach unless there is some good reason to impeach. The Constitution requires a “high crime or misdemeanor.” It is the House that decides if there is a high crime or misdemeanor but they should make this determination carefully and in good faith. Impeaching a president for trivialities would weaken our country, and it would also be unconstitutional.

Our third consideration is, do we have enough votes in the Senate to remove the president from office after he has been impeached? Obviously, the House can impeach the president even if there are no votes for removal in the Senate, but SHOULD they?

An impeachment is like an indictment and the Senate proceedings are like a trial. Should we indict someone if there is no chance they will be found guilty? Most people would say no. I think we should follow that same rule here, don't impeach unless there is a reasonable chance the president will be removed by the Senate.

Our final rule should be to have the support of the people. Just as we should not go to war without a majority of the people behind us, so, we should not attempt to impeach and remove a president without a majority of the people behind us. This is not a legal or Constitutional requirement but I think we should not do something so extreme as removing a president without showing respect for the will of the people the government is supposed to serve.

So those are the four rules I propose for a smart and moderate position on impeachment:

• You must have the votes in the House.
• You must have a high crime or misdemeanor.
• You must have a reasonable chance the Senate will remove the president.
• You must have the support of a majority of the people.

Now if we apply these rules to the current problems with Trump, what do we find?

I believe we do have a high crime and misdemeanor in the Trump case. Mueller was appointed to investigate real and serious crimes of Russian interference in the 2016 election. These crimes included hacking into American computers, and these crimes resulted in the indictments of several Russians. As the American people saw on the news almost every day during the investigation, and as Mueller documented in his final report, Trump repeatedly tried to interfere with the investigation of these real and serious Russian crimes. That interference by the president, that obstruction, is a high crime.

So we have the high crime now, but we still do not have the votes in the house to impeach, we still do not have the votes in the Senate to remove, we still do not have the support of the people for impeachment and removal.

For those of us who believe Trump's high crime SHOULD result in his removal from office what we have to do now is PERSUADE.

• We have to persuade the House to vote for impeachment.
• We have to persuade the Senate to vote for removal.
• We have to persuade the American people to support the impeachment and removal of the president.

And if we can't do that, we have to persuade the American people to vote him out of office in 2020.

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Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Wayne Gadway