It's hard to imagine more serious misconduct than aggressively attacking an endangered climate in ways that put the future of civilization in jeopardy. Unlike actual hijacks of planes, which are of course crimes, our "delinquent" hijack of the impeachment conversation seems legally cleared for takeoff.
(Not to engage in overkill, but since our constitutional legitimacy in calling for Trump's climate-based impeachment is vitally important, I thought I'd cite a few more reputable legal sources backing our position. These articles from the Constitutional Rights Foundation and Common Cause support the notion that grave misdeeds violating the public trust--not statutory crimes--are the standards for impeachment. And this piece, created by a Findlaw team of lawyer writers and editors, enumerates four legal interpretation schools--of which only one holds that impeachable offense must be crimes--without endorsing any. Interested readers could easily find many more reputable sources showing that impeachment based on grievous misdeeds that aren't indictable legal crimes has extremely solid legal standing.).
How Trump's Climate Impeachment Is Key to GND Strategy
In my previous article, I'd already pointed out one huge advantage of climate and GND activists demanding that Democrats impeach Trump over his criminally insane climate policy. Namely--and this applies only to Democrats' overcrowded field of presidential candidates--it's the perfect, unavoidable litmus test for finding out which Democrats are serious, gutsy, and committed enough to do the unprecedented political heavy lifting an effective GND will demand.
Only candidates willing to buck their party leadership and stick their necks out for as radical and unconventional an idea as impeaching Trump for his worse-than-criminal climate policy are ready to lead the long, uphill fight for an effective GND. No one rejecting this impeachment scheme--which is really merely principled common sense--is likely to have what it takes. And this is an almost-perfect litmus test; it doesn't involve any easy present promise easily forgotten after the election, but demands taking a public, gutsy position right now. See who's willing to make that gutsy position, and you know who has the goods to fight with commitment for an effective GND.
But the value of impeaching Trump over climate policy goes way beyond being a powerful GND litmus test for Democrat presidential candidates. It's actually part of a grand GND political strategy--the only strategy I know of that's fully addressed the almost-insurmountable political obstacles facing the GND. If the strategy seems radical, it's because the obstacles are radical--and totally undiscussed by any candidate now claiming support for the GND . Because Sunrise and the other "climate kids" were the only ones radical and principled enough to publicly demand the GND, I'm addressing you with this strategy, because most of my fellow older adults are clearly not radical and principled enough to get it. So please listen up, because this strategy is perhaps the only truly valuable thing I as an older, experienced activist have to offer you.
No GND advocates I know of are discussing it, but by far the biggest obstacle to passing an effective GND is today's Republican Party. As haters of climate science and government spending on behalf of average people--two crucial elements of the GND--Republicans see the GND as an existential threat to everything their party stands for. They're not wrong, which is why Sunrise was so smart to take its fight for the GND to Congressional Democrats. It's totally fair to say today's GOP is incompatible with an effective GND: one or the other has to die. That's why a Democratic candidate like Joe Biden, who wants to get along with congressional Republicans, is such a horrible, suicidal choice to lead the long, uphill fight for the GND. We need a Democrat GND champion who wants 1) to smash Republicans in a 2020 electoral landslide and 2) to put the GOP as a climate-denying party on permanent life support--much as it was in the days of FDR's original New Deal.
Please don't think I'm being partisan. Anyone who's even glanced at my writings knows how scathing I can be about Democrats. In fact, no one could propose anything that disgusts and threatens the Democrat leadership as much as the principled climate impeachment proposal I'm making here. But the facts are clear: the climate-killing extremism of today's GOP is suicidal for humanity and therefore should be suicidal for the party itself. The problem with Democrats is that they like to keep the GOP around as a scapegoat for their own unwillingness to abandon their own rich donors and pass rational popular policies like Medicare for All. Or the Green New Deal. Don't think for a second the Democrat leadership wants to defeat Republicans in a 2020 landslide. In that case, all the blame for not passing the GND--or for watering it down and fatally weakening it--would be on them. Only Democrats looking to demolish Republicans in a 2020 landslide are real friends to the GND.
Which brings us back to impeaching Trump for his terrorist war on climate. As I've said myself, Trump's insanely extremist climate policies are just normal Republican climate policies--on steroids. To some extent, Trump being history's foremost climate criminal is just a matter of timing: Trump became president when news of humanity's climate crisis was at its worst, though any Republican president would have done some version of the same.
But Trump brought unique personality elements to the presidency--elements that caused him to deliver standard Republican climate policies at their extremist worst. Trump is both a headstrong authoritarian and a high-stakes gambler, two qualities that have made putting him in charge of climate policy catastrophic for humanity. But by intensifying the extremism of normal Republican climate policy (elevating it to climate terrorism), Trump has probably done more than any single person to assist the suicide of today's GOP.
If Democrats are unwilling to do the right thing and further assist that suicide, today's real grownups--you climate kids--must embarrass them into doing so. By demanding Trump be impeached for the most morally and intellectually compelling reason--an essentially Republican climate policy that threatens to end civilization itself--climate kids would set Republicans up for electoral demolition in 2020. If we offer voters a stark choice between a popular Green New Deal and civilization-threatening climate terrorism, which side would you bet on to win in a landslide?
Publicizing Republican climate terrorism by impeaching Trump for it now is the best way to set Republicans up for catastrophic defeat in 2020, paving the way for passing the GND. I strongly urge our heroic climate kids to demand Trump's impeachment for climate terrorism now. Any Senate Republicans who wouldn't convict simply prove that Trump's climate terrorism is standard GOP policy.
In my next piece, I'll discuss another brilliant part of this strategy: how it exposes Democrats as frauds if they won't take up the commonsense call to impeach Trump for by far his worst crime.
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