Within the week nearly passed, this blogger received from a couple of old (emphasis justified) college friends expressing existential rage at the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office and his despicable antics and his whiny despicable voice. The tone of those e-mails made the blogger receptive to yesterday;s NY Fishwrap Op-Ed essay by The Viper (Michelle Goldberg) that calls all who hate the presence of the HA in our lives and consciousness to virtually grow a pair (of cojones), regardless of gender, and convict the son of a female dog (a terrible insult to bitches everywhere in the land) of high crimes and misdemeanors and have US Marshals perp walk the HA out of the White House and place him in a seat in a Greyhound bus bound for NYC that waits at the curb. No boarding the Marine One helicopter for a ride to Andrews AFB and Air Force One for a flight to NYC. At the end of the bus trip, the HA would be ejected onto the sidewalk in the worst Harlem neighborhood in the dead of night. No Secret Service, no black SUV, no media TV; just a washed up grifter on that sidewalk stumbling to nowhere. If this is a (fair & balanced) dream scenario, so be it..
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
[x NY Fishwrap]
Impeaching Trump Is Risky — So Is Refusing To
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump stormed out of a meeting on infrastructure with Democratic leaders and held a tantrum of a news conference. He was indignant that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had said earlier in the day that he was engaged in a cover-up, and insisted he wouldn’t work with Congress unless it stops investigating him. “You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with,” he said.
Shortly afterward, Pelosi was interviewed onstage at a conference of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “The fact is, in plain sight, in the public domain, this president is obstructing justice and he’s engaged in a cover-up, and that could be an impeachable offense,” she said, to applause from a crowd full of Democratic operatives and donors. She pointed out that the third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved his refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas, which, of course, Trump has done as well. A few moments later she described Trump as an “existential threat to our democracy.”
Yet even as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are calling for an impeachment inquiry, Pelosi insists that the time has not yet come for such a serious step. The “House Democratic caucus is not on a path to impeachment,” she told reporters on Thursday.
This position is increasingly incoherent. If Trump’s outrageous misdeeds are visible for all to see — and they are — you don’t need further investigation to justify beginning an inquiry into whether impeachment is justified. Pelosi has suggested that impeachment will distract from the affirmative Democratic agenda, but the Republican-controlled Senate is no more going to pass progressive legislation than it will vote to remove Trump. And now the president has ruled out action on bipartisan initiatives like infrastructure investment, essentially refusing to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities whether he’s impeached or not.
Given all this, some of the public arguments leading Democrats are making against impeachment have the slickly disingenuous feel of slogans crafted by political consultants. “Political calculation has nothing to do with the manner in which we are proceeding,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a key Pelosi ally, told me at the Center for American Progress conference. But minutes later, he said, “We didn’t campaign on impeachment. We did not campaign on collusion. We did not campaign on obstruction of justice. We did campaign on lowering health care costs.”
Of course, the real reasons for Democratic hesitation on impeachment are obvious enough. Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to remove Trump, and fear an acquittal in that chamber could embolden him. A majority of voters is not yet convinced that impeachment is warranted, even if they believe Trump is a criminal. Many newly elected Democrats in swing districts don’t want to have to vote on impeachment, and Democrats fear a backlash similar to the one Republicans faced after impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998.
All these hazards are real. But there are also dangers if Democrats fail to take their appraisal of Trump to its logical conclusions. Following public opinion on impeachment, as opposed to attempting to shape it, makes them look weak and vacillating. Endless calls for further investigation send the message that the staggering corruption and abuse of power that Trump has already engaged in is somehow tolerable. And as Brian Beutler has pointed out, if Democrats don’t seize the offensive in both procedural and narrative terms, Republicans will, pressing on with their Benghazi-style investigations into the origins of the Russia probe while inviting even more foreign help in 2020.
The point of impeachment is not to remove Trump before the 2020 election. It is to make clear, in the starkest possible way, why Democrats believe he should be removed. The remainder of his term should be consumed by a formal, televised presentation of all the ways he’s disgraced his office. It’s true that were Trump to be re-elected after such a reckoning, he might be even further unleashed. But were Trump to be re-elected in the absence of impeachment, it would still be seen as a vindication for him, and would leave Democrats humiliated by their excess of caution.
Some Democrats might fear a repeat of the mistakes Republicans made when they impeached Clinton two decades ago, but this suggests a lack of faith in their own leadership. Clinton was impeached for covering up sex with an intern. Were Trump to be impeached, it would be for covering up his entanglements, financial and otherwise, with a hostile foreign power, blatantly profiting from his office, declaring himself above the law, and demanding freedom from oversight as the price of fulfilling ordinary presidential responsibilities. If Democratic politicians don’t believe they can make the public see the difference between these two impeachment scenarios, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
Besides, the notion that Republicans suffered a devastating rebuke as a result of the Clinton impeachment is overblown. Republicans kept the House in the 1998 midterms, though Democrats gained five seats. Clinton was damaged enough that his vice president, Al Gore, held him at a distance while running to succeed him. In the 2000 election, Republicans won the presidency, kept the House, and narrowly took the Senate, giving them trifecta control of government for the first time in nearly half a century. Can this really be the cautionary tale that’s frightening Democrats from doing all they can to hold a lawless president to account?
At the Center for American Progress conference, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised Representative Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican who, on in a Twitter thread on Saturday, laid out the ways that Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct.” Responding to Amash’s case against the president, members of the wealthy family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said they were cutting off their financial support for the congressman. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which Amash helped found, condemned him, and he’s facing a primary challenge.
“The fact that he is willing to risk his seat shows a lot of the courage of that conviction, and that has been in very short supply,” Schiff told the audience. He added, “Courage is contagious, but so is cowardice.” He’s right, but not just about Republicans. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
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