Despite polls showing that a majority of Americans are not yet supporting impeachment, presidential primary candidates must be forced to take a stand on this. Some, Warren and Buttegieg, already have called for impeachment. That may be going farther than necessary. I believe that all must call for aggressive investigations that could produce and corroborate clear evidence of impeachable offenses.
Critics will argue that there's nothing to the Russian collusion accusations. The best way to handle that is to start off by making it clear that that is not what is being investigated.
It would probably be best to create a bullet list of short items that Trump is being investigate for. These might include (I'm cherry-picking and summarizing Swanson's list):
- Violation of the constitution's emoluments clause, Domestic and Foreign
- Obstruction of justice
- Politicizing prosecutions
- Refusing, for political reasons, to respond to a disaster in Puerto Rico, contributing to the deaths of thousands
- Illegally Attempting to Influence an Election
- Tax Fraud and Public Misrepresentation
- Repeated inducements for government officials to violate the law, with promises of presidential pardons
- Acting with the interests of an often-hostile foreign power influencing him
There is no reason that a strong, courageous, effective Democratic majority leader of the House cannot pursue the course I am proposing and also get other necessary, important progressive legislation done, dealing with jobs, climate change, voting machines (a crisis we've been documenting for sixteen years here at OpEdNews) and much more. Considering that a complicit Republican leadership in the Senate will block most legislation coming out of the House, and since Trump will veto most legislation the House produces that the Senate supports, the investigation of Trump is probably the most effective, historically significant and morally effective thing that the House can do.
I believe that taking this action will likely lead to Trump being forced to resign from office, which probably means Mike Pence will become president and that Pence will pardon Trump-- the only way Trump will be persuaded to resign. But the process of investigating Trump will lead to a rising support for impeachment and a disgust with the Republican enablers of Trump, which will lead to a sweeping out of those enablers in the Senate, House and White House. It will take strong can-do, on-the-table leadership to make this happen. Even if Mitch McConnell is forced to go along with the impeachment, the level of enabling by the Republicans will have been so malodorously evident, they will be damaged so severely, it will be very likely the Democrats will take the House and Senate. That's why it's essential to extract promises from the Democratic primary candidates that the investigations and prosecutions will not stop, that they will not pull an Obama "look forward, not backwards." Every candidate should be willing to support legislation that mandates investigations of presidents while they are in office and after they leave.
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