Clearly, it’s time to revisit impeachment ethics issues, after Nancy Pelosi’s snide declaration (after saying that she is always respectful of the Presidency, mind you), that the President “wasn’t worth it,” it being the political risk of sending him to a trial in the Senate. We should pause a second to acknowledge the hilarity inherent in the Speaker saying that impeachment wasn’t desirable because it would be “divisive to the country” and “divides the country.” The Democrats, led by Barack Obama, who pointed the way, have intentionally and cynically sliced and diced the country into victims and villains, champions of the oppressed and deplorables, for a decade, unforgivably risking national strength, comity, and peace for speculative electoral gain.
We haven’t added a new Plan to the list of “resistance” and Democratic Party coup attempts—for that’s what they are–including impeachment theories, since last July, though many of the classics re-emerged in the news. Remember, there were law professors who advocated impeaching Trump before he was inaugurated. Here’s where it stands:
Impeachment And Coup Plans.
Plan A: Reverse the election by hijacking the Electoral College.[Status: FAILED and DEAD, until it rises again in 2020]
Plan B: Pre-emptive impeachment. [Status: FAILED and DEAD]
Plan C : The Emoluments Clause. [Status: Still twitching! ]
Plan D: “Collusion with Russia” [Status: On life support]
Plan E : ”Trump is mentally ill so this should trigger the 25th Amendment.” [Status: Amazingly, still being talked about .]
Plan F: The Maxine Waters Plan, which is to just impeach the President as soon as Democrats control both Houses, because they can. [Status: Hope springs eternal!]
Plan G : “The President obstructed justice by firing incompetent subordinates, and that’s impeachable.” [Status: LAME, but ONGOING]
Plan H: “Tweeting stupid stuff is impeachable” [Status: ONGOING]
Plan I: “Let’s relentlessly harass him and insult him and obstruct his efforts to do his job so he snaps and does something really impeachable.” [Status: ONGOING]
Plan J : Force Trump’s resignation based on alleged sexual misconduct that predated his candidacy. .[Status: FAILED and DEAD]
Plan K: Election law violations through pay-offs of old sex-partners [Status: ONGOING]
Plan L: The perjury trap: get Trump to testify under oath, then prove something he said was a lie. [Status: To be determined.]
Plan M: Guilt by association. Prove close associates or family members violated laws. [Status: Ongoing.]
Plan N: Claim that Trump’s comments at his press conference with Putin were “treasonous.”
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the soft coup-complicit news media hasn’t been predicting impeachable results from the Mueller investigation lately, which seems odd, since they have been fanning flames of anticipation and suspicion from the day it started. This is because most rational observers are pretty certain that Trump, as he has said from the beginning, did nothing wrong, and certainly nothing impeachable regarding Russia. Never mind: Democrats have made it clear that this soon-to-be-pronounced dead horse will be flogged by them into goo as long as it attracts donations and is a viable means of stopping the elected President from doing the job he was duly elected to do.
Pelosi’s comments could only be rationally received as ruling out Plan F, the “impeach Donald Trump because we don’t like him, we think anyone who voted for him is a deplorable racist moron whose opinions shouldn’t count, and besides it was time for a woman to be President” approach. This is a good thing, although it probably describes better than any of the other plans the real motives of Democrats and the resistance since that fateful day in November 2016 that had cable news hosts looking as if their puppies had died in bloody shredder accident.
Nonetheless, the New York Times, among others, chose to spin Pelosi’s words as it has spun most of its coverage of President Trump, using the assumption that he is guilty of something warranting impeachment:
“Ms. Pelosi may also be setting a far-reaching new standard with implications long after Mr. Trump leaves office. By her reasoning, accusations of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, campaign finance violations and other offenses — even if proved — do not rise to a level requiring action by the House of Representatives.”
She didn’t say that, and in fact she even said the opposite. (Yes, by the Ethics Alarms definition, the Times assertion qualifies as fake news) In the same interview where she rejected impeachment. she applied the qualifier that “unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.” In other words, unless there’s valid justification for impeachment as the Constitution defines it, the Democrats won’t impeach. Boy, that’s big of her! A President of the United States should only be removed from office outside of an election if he or she has committed crimes or other bad acts in office so destructive of the nation’s trust and so contrary to the President’s oath of office that it mandates conviction and removal. That isn’t any new standard, that IS the standard. It is a dauntingly and intentionally high one, which is why no President has ever been impeached and convicted. Nixon would have been, but that case is also is instructive: when the high bar has been cleared, and the conclusions about a President’s impeachable conduct can no longer be called tainted by partisanship, any rational President will leave of his own volition.
The Times fake spin goes on:
All of which raise fundamental questions: If Mr. Trump has done what he is accused of doing, and that would not qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors, then what would? If Congress opts against impeachment regardless of what the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, reports, would that set the bar so high that impeachment will no longer be a viable option? Will future presidents have license to cross all sorts of lines because of the precedent? In other words, if not Mr. Trump, then who?
Hold it. Accused by who? There have been no credible accusations of impeachable misconduct in the White House. Were it not for the President’s blunder of appointing a member of his campaign as Attorney General, the Justice Department would have been justified in running its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election games, without the fanciful Democratic presumption that Trump must have been helping them, because, really, how could that great candidate, Hillary Clinton, have lost unless something funny was going on? Trump being accused of treason, which is what conspiring with an adverse foreign power to undermine our elections would be, is of no more substance than accusing him of sex trafficking or cannibalism in the absence of evidence that it happened. Nobody has suggested that if Mueller can build a credible, fair and objectively damning case that Trump was in cahoots with Russia, he wouldn’t or shouldn’t be impeached. I will be demanding an impeachment, if there is evidence. Accusations aren’t evidence, especially these kind of accusations, once justified here by several Trump Derangement victims, that the accusations have substance because they just know he’s guilty, because, because, well, just look at him!
The other accusations are just contrived theories, represented in the Plans above. No, firing a subordinate who made it clear to all before and after he was fired cannot constitute “obstruction of justice,” for example, except to biased partisan whose goal is to remove him by any means possible. So many members of academia, the news media and of course “the resistance,” just can’t help themselves jump over the part where President Trump has been proven to have actually done something impeachable. “We don’t necessarily take all that off the table as impeachable offenses, but people will argue, ‘But what about Trump?’” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor and an impeachment scholar at the University of North Carolina. “If Trump can get away with it, why not President X or Y? He’s raised the bar.”
How has he “raised the bar”? Get away with what? What people “will argue”? People who have wanted to impeach this President from the beginning, for whom the justifications, if any, don’t matter, that’s who.
More fake history from the Times:
“The reluctance of Democratic leaders to pursue impeachment owes to the scars left by the clash between Mr. Clinton and Congress in 1998-99, when Republicans suffered at the ballot box from what appeared to be a partisan drive to push out the president.”
But Clinton had crossed the line. He had lied under oath in a court of law: lawyers get disbarred for that (indeed, Clinton lost his license as a lawyer as a result), and we’re going to hold President’s to lesser standards? There was sufficient evidence that Clinton also obstructed justice. Democrats succeeded in corrupting the entire nation as a desperate and culturally ruinous defense of Clinton,”it’s just sex,” “everybody does it,” leading directly to the many powerful men who felt empowered to sexually abuse women and subordinates, thanks to the rationalizations of Bill and his enablers. The Republican Congress did the right thing.
IF a President clearly crosses the line laid out by the Founders, I agree with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, who says,
“If we have a clear impeachable offense that is not a borderline one but a clear one, the impeachment process is mandatory because the House of Representatives is an agent of ‘we the people,’ the first three words of the Constitution. It may be, as a realistic matter, the Senate is going to stick with a president to whom it has a political allegiance. But the House isn’t supposed to think about that.”
Ethics Alarms 
Plan G took a hit this week with testimony from Lisa Page.
Did it ever.
Somewhat related
Examine Mitt Romney’s statement regarding why he voted yes to pass the Democrat bill rebuking the Emergency declaration.
Specifically, “For the Executive Branch to override a law passed by Congress would make it the ultimate power rather than a balancing power”.
And we blame schools for the lack of civics understanding when sitting Senators do not understand the Presidential veto balances Congressional acts and Congress can override the veto if it can muster enough votes.
Romney just exposed himself as a true demagogue or an idiot.
Personally, I’d go with an idiot.
Not to mention the fact that Congress gave POTUS the emergency power. They can take it away, but I don’t care to hear hwo using what it gave him is some kind of power grab.
Okay, I missed something. Who is Lisa Page and what did she say?
More or less that the FBI was instructed by the Justice Department that Hillary would not be charged under “gross negligence”. Which makes me wonder if that instruction was delivered right after the tarmac meeting.
Meant to include a link.
DD
Lisa Page was a lawyer in theFBI who was the paramour of Strozk who was dismissed. Page testified that the word from DOJ was to not charge HRC. So basically her testimony was that the fix was in for HRC.
That’s one of two. She also testified that she told the team there was no legal grounds to open the Trump investigation prior to Muller’s appointment. She said there was no factual evidence, only unverified rumors.
…and that is all we still have: rumors
And one of those powerful men was Donald J. Trump.
Well sure.
It is almost like karma.
The difference is that Trump’s actions did not take place while he occupied the Oval Office. Clinton’s did…in fact, occurring IN the Oval Office. Doesn’t make him any less of a slime-ball, but is NOT impeachable.
One of many material distinctions.
True, that.
Does anyone really think that powerful men being able to exploit women sexually is a new phenomenom.
Just to be contrarian, would the behavior of women, collequally termed “using her feminine wiles” be equally exploitive if they use their sexuality to obtain what they want?
Democrats may have corrupted parts of society but I cannot lay that one at their feet.
I can and I do. The culture was making great progress, in part because of feminists and the women’s movement. Then they sided with Clinton, and sexual predators, because he supported abortion.
Remember Nina Burleigh?
I never understood the feminists protecting Clinton… it was a large step in my understanding that the Elite are about power and nothing else.
I wonder how many of them made the connection between the precedent that they set and the election of Donald Trump.
Simple, consequences-free sex trumps all.
Except that does not exist outside of Hollywood fever dreams.
Sex always has consequences, even if they do not show up until years later.
Got it! Read Phlinn’s link. I have said, from the get-go, that the fix was in, only to be shouted down. So, now it looks like I was right. The ‘fix’ WAS in.
… and the TDS folks who left this blog in a huff can stuff it. They were wrong, and we were right.
No doubt we were making progress. My mother told me of the abuse she suffered working in higher ed for a male superior in the 70s.
I will go along with Dems being enablers but Republicans and Independents were also willing to give a pass.
I just don’t want to lay this at any one group’s feet because I could point to Hip Hop culture or rock stars and their groupies. The argument that sexual exploitation is more prevalent among liberals may be fair because of liberal sexual attitudes toward sex but exploitation by those who claim some moral outrage at sexual promiscuity is equally reprehensible
The Bob Packwood scandal, a GOP Senator, was supposed to be a step forward. He was a major power in the Senate, respected. The Feminists went after him in force. High profile. Lesson taught! And Clinton (and Hillary) corrupted the Democrats and the feminists undid it all. THAT was on them (and the news media that let them do it.). Nobody else. The Republican were supposed to be the 5o’s pigs who chased secretaries around the desk. The Democrats were supposed to be the good guys, the champions. And they betrayed the people who trusted them.
I hve never trusted that party since, and I never will.
Want to talk about raising the bar?
Bill Clinton raised the bar to where deplorable conduct towards women is no longer radioactive. The lefts pass on sexual harassment and probable rape has everything to do with “grab them by the pussy” being ineffective as an October surprise.
Democrats are never supposed to be held to the rules they impose on everyone else. This has been the thinking for so long now that they really did not see the reaction from common Americans coming. Just another reason the election ‘must’ have been stolen.
No, it wouldn’t be treason. Treason, as defined in the Constitution (and in 18 USC 2381) specifically requires:
a) Levying war against the United States, or;
b) Conspiring with or giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States.
Russia is not currently our enemy. I know this because we are not at war with Russia, and the definition of treason is explicitly confined to activities during a war. Further, I believe it must be a war declared by Congress, not something like the Iraq war or “war on terror.”
Without a war, there cannot be treason, ever — even by Donald Trump.
What I think you meant to say was it would be treasonous, and I think I’d agree with that. It would have the character or characteristics of treason as an act unfaithful to the country or inimical to the Constitution by aiding a geopolitical opponent and subverting the constitutional processes thereof.
Regarding Pelosi, there is no way to make sense of the gibberish she spouts. Politicians on both sides of the isle treat consistency and logic in their positions as optional, rather than mandatory or even desirable. Pelosi’s among the worst at talking out of both sides of her face.
Regarding the Times, they have once again proved, as though it were necessary to have quadruple-digit pieces of evidence in support of the proposition, that they have neither understanding nor concern about how our Constitutional republic is supposed to function. They only care about what they want to happen.
The Times exists to gaslight the public. I am beginning to believe this has always been true: mix enough truth with the fake news and eventually you can go with just the fake news, of so you think.
The Times is no different than Pravda.
They are a little different, I reckon, and not in a good way.
Pravda is state owned and operated, and spouts only state propaganda. People know what they are getting with Pravda.
The Times styles itself as unbiased journalists, its op-ed board as rational and fair, and in fact, they are neither.
A difference that makes no difference is not difference. The ultimate impact is the same, for one who pays attention and realizes how the Times really operates.
Or as my daughter would say, “Same Difference!” (a phrase that drives me to distraction)
I’m afraid I can’t agree.
It may make no difference in how it appears, but it makes a great deal of difference down the line. In one case, the news service is trying to support the legal government of a country. They are employed to perform that explicit function.
In another case, (the Times) the news service is actively trying to subvert the government, and is fraudulently representing itself as an honest source of news knowing full well it isn’t.
To me, that matters a lot.
stipulated, then. The Times is WORSE than Pravda.
Agreed.
The definition needs cleaning up to reflect modern foreign relations. I haven’t checked: what were the people who gave secrets to China or Russia? During the “Cold War,” which wasn’t a declared war? (b) in that definition would apply to any one who materially and intentionally assists a hostile power—which Russia is—in undermining US interests, thus betraying the US and its citizens? If Bradley Manning isn’t a traitor, then the word is legally incoherent.
Nobody was convicted of treason for selling secrets during the cold war. The list of people convicted of treason in the USA may be here (if you distrust Wikipedia, there are other sources for the same information).
Article I section 8 enumerates the power to declare war exclusively to Congress. There can be no legal “war” without such a declaration. The Rosenbergs are classic examples. They were US citizens spying for the USSR during the cold war. If they couldn’t be charged with treason because of the lack of a state of war, nobody could.
As to updating the definition, in my opinion that can only be done by constitutional amendment. Because treason is dependent upon what is “war,” and declaring war is an enumerated, exclusive power of Congress, I don’t think revising treason is realistic.
Not to worry, there are plenty of other crimes involving collaboration with foreign powers.
So it would have been impossible to commit literal treason during the Vietnam War. This is a technical legal distinction rather than an ethical one.
Well, we DID execute the Rosenbergs, treason or no.
Yeah. Espionage is a pretty serious crime, you know, and whether by conviction on treason or spying, dead is dead.
Price paid, in full cash.
I don’t know, Jack. Treason is just a word, and a fraught one at that.
I think it’s ethically irrelevant what we call a crime. And perhaps more to your point, the unstated reality that the mechanism for going to war has been irretrievably broken.
It’s my observation that regardless of truth, facts, reality, critical thinking, or logic, the vast majority of the political left believe wholeheartedly without a shred of doubt that Trump is actually a traitor, a criminal, a misogynist, a racist, is literally insane, he got in office illegally, he is evil, etc, etc and that Trump should not be in the office of the President of the United States because of the things they believe are true. It’s also my observation that the same people that believe the things I mentioned about Trump also believe that anyone that does not hate Trump, is roughly equivalent to Trump and therefore equally evil. Society is irretrievably broken because the hive mind of the political left has been brainwashed into believing that they should base all political decisions, personal opinions, and individual actions on emotions only and any deviation from that is completely unacceptable. These people will literally destroy the United States Constitution piece-by-piece until there’s nothing left of it simply because the Constitution is what allowed Trump to get elected to office and prevented them from removing him from office and they must do what ever it takes to eliminate any future possibility of a Trump like evil being elected again. These beliefs are brainwashed into the very soul of these hive minded people and there’s absolutely nothing short of actually reprogramming them that will change their minds.
There is no predicting what will happen if the political left obtains a super majority in both houses of Congress and have a Progressive in the White House.
What we see in today’s society is that the political left is a hive mind of narcissists that have crossed over into full blown delusion.
My gut instinct is that Pelosi’s declaration was more akin to a claim of “now that we see we are going to lose this fight (the Mueller investigation) let’s just pretend like we never were *trying* to win to begin with”.
It didn’t work in kindergarten and it doesn’t work for adults either. Nice try though Nance
My gut instinct is that your gut instinct is right. It’s an attempt at face-saving for her party. To her credit, she has always opposed the coup by impeachment plot.