The fall out from this impeachment
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Started by wglassfo - Dec. 20, 2019, 10:58 a.m.

Have the Dems lowered the bar of impeachment to a level such as any congress with enough votes can impeach a sitting president on rather flimsy evidence of possible high crimes and misdeamours

Is it possible this could become rather routine in coming yrs if the votes are there??

Could congress usurp the will of a majority of voters, for president, just by having a majority of votes in congress

Regardless if Trump is impeached, it looks to me as if congress has just become the supreme power of all three bodies and the checks and balances are no longer effective

It looks to me as if, it has now become a contest in future elections, of who has the majority of votes in congress.

The elected president may or may not have 4 yrs in the WH, contrary to the will of the majority if voters or the electoral college

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By pj - Dec. 20, 2019, 6:12 p.m.
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"Regardless if Trump is impeached..."

He has been impeached.


By metmike - Dec. 20, 2019, 7:28 p.m.
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I thought the exact same thing too pj but apparently not technically or by the book.


https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosis-problem-dems-own-witness-says-trump-not-truly-impeached-unless-articles-go-to-senate


"Pelosi, D-Calif., is apparently using the delay as leverage to extract favorable terms for a Senate trial. But Noah Feldman wrote for Bloomberg that an “indefinite delay” would pose a “serious problem”—as impeachment only technically happens when the articles are transmitted to the Senate.

“Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution: The House must actually send the articles and send managers to the Senate to prosecute the impeachment. And the Senate must actually hold a trial,” Feldman wrote.

“If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president,” he continued. “If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say he wasn’t truly impeached at all.”

metmike: For all practical purposes, 99.9% of people will think of the president being impeached already by the house, which is all the house cares about(what people think).

If this were a real court that required fulfilling actual legalities by the prosecutor for the conviction, an absence of doing that might mean the defendants rights were violated and/or there would be no convictions for the crimes.

In this case, that doesn't matter. The spectacle of the house run testimony and charges, along with their almost daily "bombshell" "smoking gun" narratives played on MSM for the American people was accomplished. 

The objective has always been to keep Trump from being elected again in 2020 because chances for removal from office have been near 0 from the get go.(no way to get a 2/3rd majority in the senate, when they have the majority and not 1 republican is for impeachment).

Ironic that this is all about a phone call and a few other actions by Trump to investigate a potential 2020 candidate, who probably was corrupt with nepotism and more because he might be somebody that Trump runs against next year..........but the dems are actually doing exactly what they accuse President Trump of doing, trying to affect the 2020 election by ruining his credibility but the measures that they have gone to do it are several orders of magnitude more extreme, contrived and blatant. 

Of course Trump is a horribly flawed person and gets rock bottom scores for character traits but we aren't impeaching over that. His actions don't even come close to anything that would be impeachable. We can site many many dozens to hundreds of actions from presidents in history that would qualify as abuse of power worse than this using these democrat standards.

 

These American Presidents Were Accused of Abusing Their Power

https://historycollection.co/these-american-presidents-were-accused-of-abusing-their-power/

A look back at presidential abuse of power

https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/a-look-back-at-presidential-abuse-of-power


These charges against Trump are just silly when viewed as impeachable offenses and the historical office/actions by past presidents.  Most presidents should have been impeached by the opposing party(if they could do it) going by these rules.

Instead of blaming the republicans for supposedly not having a conscience as being the reason for this being partisan, maybe the other side should have used a more fair and biparisan definition for what is an impeachable offense vs letting hate and disagreement over policies control their positions. 


By metmike - Dec. 20, 2019, 8:04 p.m.
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So we can disagree on whether Trump should be impeached or not but not about how this is a huge embarrassment to this country and increased divisiveness even more while accomplishing nothing..........wasting more tax dollars and political resources/efforts to get things done for the American people and caused their already rock bottom favor-ability ratings to drop lower.

We elected these people and are paying them for this circus.


It has zero affect on Trumps legal status as president. If he could be impeached and removed from office by the senate, even though I would strongly disagree with that decision based on the charges, there would be a legit, end point objective that makes the effort worth while.

But this monumental effort is only intended for one thing. To affect the 2020 election by trying to influence voters minds about President Trump. 

The impeachment process was absolutely not intended to be abused by one party in a totally political/partisan manner to affect the next election as is happening right now.

A vote condemning the presidents actions would have been much more appropriate.

Here's a good example of how that works:

Bipartisan House vote condemns Trump’s withdrawal from Syria

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/bipartisan-house-vote-condemns-trumps-withdrawal-from-syria

Though I've always been with guys like Ron/Rand Paul and agree with decisions that get us out of the Middle East(finally) you will note the bipartisan nature of this action.....which gives it more credibility.

One can guess that if this phone call had resulted in a vote to condemn the actions(investigating corruption in the Ukraine that included targeting Joe Biden) that you would have had numerous republicans agreeing that it was inappropriate and joined in the condemnation vote.

But the democrats had to make it impeachment which just can't be justified by objective sources and for sure not subjective republicans.

It would be like calling for a lengthy prison sentence imposed on a person guilty of stealing something worth $100.  


The consequence of the democrats going way overboard with the penalty far exceeding the actions of Trump(which were not even close to being crimes) has turned our impeachment and political system into a big farce, being used entirely to attack an opponent.


By pj - Dec. 20, 2019, 10:56 p.m.
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"But this monumental effort is only intended for one thing. To affect the 2020 election by trying to influence voters minds about President Trump."

Seriously doubt the whole rigmarole will change anyone's mind or vote. Think about as much could have been accomplished by putting two TVs in the same room facing each other, one tuned to CNN the other to FOX News.

By GunterK - Dec. 20, 2019, 11:28 p.m.
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I agree with you, Wayne. It has already been mentioned that from now on, every newly elected president will be the target of an impeachment inquiry, with the intent of removing him from office, when Congress favored the other guy.

This means, the rest of the world will be laughing at the political mess the US has turned into...which will make it more difficult to topple other governments and offer them US style democracy.

the other question is "what will be the fall-out of all this in 2020?"

WaPo has already pointed out that the anti-Trumpers will still be against Trump, as always, and the "Trumpsters" will back Trump, as always

But what about the voters in the "Middle', the undecideds?

Unless they have only watched CNN or read the NYT to get their news  (which gave them a distorted view of reality), they must be appalled by what has happened since 2016.... for more than 2 years an investigation into "collusion", with the news media providing daily updates of "tipping points", "bombshell news", "the beginning of the end", only to come up with nothing.... followed quickly by an equally flawed investigation of Trump doing a "quid pro quo" (also without results), while at the same time the real perpetrator of a possible quid pro quo is not even mentioned anymore in these discussions...

It seems to me, any reasonable person...any person without a biased political mind...must recognize this current impeachment argument as a desperate attempt to smear a sitting president, at all costs, It's not about "justice', its not about making the country better, its not about caring for the People... its only political hate

And, IMHO, this will backfire on them in 2020. 

Of course, they are not finished with this yet. They will think of new ways to smear the president and disrupt normal political life in the US before the election. It's war.

By TimNew - Dec. 21, 2019, 8:26 a.m.
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Seriously doubt the whole rigmarole will change anyone's mind or vote. Think about as much could have been accomplished by putting two TVs in the same room facing each other, one tuned to CNN the other to FOX News.


Actually,  some polls indicate moderate voters have become disenchanted with the efforts of the dems.

By mcfarm - Dec. 21, 2019, 9:44 a.m.
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wow, perhaps maybe even the so called moderate voter has learned that Trump is being impeached for number 1 beating Hillary, and number 2 draining the DC swamp

By metmike - Dec. 21, 2019, 3:37 p.m.
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"This means, the rest of the world will be laughing at the political mess the US has turned into...which will make it more difficult to topple other governments and offer them US style democracy."

Sadly, this is the worst example in history to demonstrate how our government is designed to work.

Three Branches of Government

                                             

              

Our federal government has three parts. They are the Executive, (President and about 5,000,000 workers) Legislative (Senate and House of Representatives) and Judicial (Supreme Court and lower Courts)

 

                        3 Branches of U.S. Government infographic. See description below.                    
          

In the current environment, the democrats are the party with the majority in the  house of representatives(legislative branch) and they are using that political affiliation against the opposite party which has control of the executive branch, republican President Trump.

So the objective is not to work together for the American people as designed by the founding fathers. It's a pure power play with the house trying to usurp  the power of the executive branch, which was Constitutionally determined by our democratic presidential election of 2016. More importantly to the dems, making pre emptive strikes to see that he doesn't win the 2020 election. 

There were no  impeachable high crimes of course and if you look at the polls of American for and against impeachment, they line up extremely close to the election results of 2016.  This is powerful evidence that this is purely political and those that want him out of office right now/impeached are the exact same ones that wanted him out of office in 2018, 2017 and did not vote for him in 2016.

This  means the rest of the country does not believe that he committed impeachable high crimes. Yes, they are biased Trump supporters that voted for him in 2016  but that is the point. We are taking constant polls on whether people think Trump should be impeached or not.  The independent voters of course may change their minds(which is the objective( but the dems are demonstrating the greatest abuse of political power in our country's long history..........by a wide margin. And the rest of the world has been watching.


Ironically, one of the charges is "abuse of power".

So let's compare President Trumps abuse of power request to Ukraine (there was no quid pro quo) to investigate legit corruption in his country because he knows it will find VP Biden being naughty. We know that if it had been VP Pence doing the same thing, this request would not have been made. It would not have been needed because if Pence had done it, all the MSM and Washington swamp would have been all over it and Pence would be out for the count but regardless, Trump did this. 

The comparison is to what the house is doing. The most powerful action that the house can take is to impeach a president. Maybe you could say declaration of war or something like that but on votes for that, you will ALWAYS find bi partisan support............ALWAYS, 100% of the time or they would not even vote on it if it was for war and 1 party was in 100% opposition.

 in this realm, there is nothing close to the level of gravity of impeaching a president which was intended to be used only in extreme circumstances, viewed in bipartisan fashion by the founding fathers. 

Nobody thinking clearly believes that this is not purely political. The entire fraudulent scheme set up with the whistle blower in contact with Schiff a month before it became public(and he lied about it) was enough to prove that.

Nobody thinking clearly believes that a president should be impeached for asking a foreign country to look into actual corruption(remember, he was not making stuff up like the Mueller investigation did-17 different significant times- Trump asked for a legit investigation) because it involved corruption of the party he is running against. 

At least half the presidents in our history used their power to go way, way beyond an attempt to get an investigation started that would hurt their opponent. 

How many times has the house blatantly abused their power to the max, in a 100% partisan effort to destroy the president of the opposite party with the "death penalty"' impeachment?

We can site Clinton's impeachment. Clinton lied under oath and did some naughty, verifiable things like witness tampering that would have resulted in charges in a real court, so there were actual crimes vs no crime for Trump but that was another embarrassing, dumb, partisan display of our government not working and complete waste of time and money.

Outside of that other example, this is by far the most outrageous example of an abuse of power by the legislative branch/house in our country's history to target a political opponent.