Trump’s Impeachment Is Virtually Over. What Did It Change?

President Donald Trump is reshaping politics in the United States.  The electorate has more political power now than in recent past elections.  Grass roots politics may be messier but that's not a bad thing.

Donald Trump is not fit to be a dogcatcher in Podunk, let alone hold a high office in national government. 

I don't see a recognition of that reality anywhere in your analysis. 

Donald Trump is not fit to be a dogcatcher in Podunk, let alone hold a high office in national government. 

Have you considered that being unfit was why Donald Trump was elected?  

Are you bragging about that? 

I don't see a recognition of that reality anywhere in your analysis. 

1) That's just like, your opinion, man. 2) It's also beside the point. That's why it's not in there.

Are you bragging about that? 

Bragging or sulking depends on which measures of 'fitness' are being applied, doesn't it?

The term "unfit" is vague and ambiguous. It's good to know millions of the electorate disagree with that opinion

According to the liberal elite, millions of the electorate are unfit to vote.  So, the technocratic liberals plan to use public education as indoctrination centers.  A mind is a terrible thing, period.

Yet the gop are the only ones who actually try to suppress the votes of groups of people they think will vote against them.  Fact..

Yet the gop are the only ones who actually try to suppress the votes of groups of people they think will vote against them.  Fact..

Democrats only purge voter rolls during the primaries.  The facts are that rigging the primaries affects the general election, too.

npr

businessinsider

At a November 21 event meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association's Wisconsin chapter, Clark spoke for about 20 minutes, and the speech was recorded by a liberal advocacy group and provided to the AP .

"Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," Clark told the group, which included Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and the executive director of the state's Republican party.

"Let's start protecting our voters," he continued, partly referring to Election Day monitoring of polling places. "We know where they are [...] Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020. It's going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program."

time

A representative for Republican candidate for governor Brian Kemp called his opponent Stacey Abrams’ unwillingness to concede before all votes were counted “a disgrace to democracy.” But leaders like Kemp are the real disgrace. Abrams engaged new voters; in turn, Kemp openly said he’d like to suppress their participation. Kemp was also running while serving as secretary of state, the office that oversees elections, and resigned two days after balloting, only when challenged by a lawsuit.

newyorker

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills designed to diminish voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder. In an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still exists, but not sufficiently to warrant the “extraordinary” remediation measures that the act imposed on the states of the former Confederacy. That argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decline in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against it. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a strict new voter-I.D. law. Mississippi and Alabama shortly afterward began enforcing similar laws that previously had been barred.

The decision added a layer of severity to a voter-access crisis precipitated by state laws that prohibit six million Americans with past convictions from voting. In three Southern states—Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky—this means that at least twenty per cent of eligible-age African-Americans cannot vote. Meanwhile, North Carolina enacted restrictions on early voting, a policy that particularly affects African-Americans, who are likely to be hourly-wage workers and cannot always get to the polls on Election Day. Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to reinstate a voter-I.D. law in North Carolina that a federal court had found targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” In effect, the question posed by Roberts’s ruling is how much discrimination there has to be before you can justify protecting voters.

Ironically, though, a number of the recent laws validate Roberts’s argument about the undue burden that the Voting Rights Act put on the South; complaints have been lodged in several states that fought for the Union, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa, which have passed strict voter-I.D. or roll-purge laws. Earlier this year, in Kansas, a federal judge struck down a law that required voters to provide proof of citizenship to register, championed by Kris Kobach, the secretary of state, who served as a vice-chair of Donald Trump’s short-lived voter-fraud commission and is now running for governor. In North Dakota, which didn’t become a state until twenty-four years after the Civil War, Native Americans must now provide an I.D. that shows a street address—even though many have only a P.O. box.

Have you considered that being unfit was why Donald Trump was elected?

It appears that he may have been more fit for the office than his opponent was / is.

It appears that he may have been more fit for the office than his opponent was / is.

I dunno.  One thing for sure, Donald Trump was more electable.

instagram

Lawmakers from Mr. Trump’s party defended the chief executive’s right to resist congressional oversight, a precedent that won’t be forgotten.

It's not a precedent. Past presidents have resisted congressional oversight. Furthermore, the House did a half-assed job - at best - of pursuing that oversight. In their hysterical rush to impeach by Christmas, they forfeited any real opportunity to examine the witnesses and documents they craved. Trump didn't defeat them. They did it to themselves.

It's not a precedent. Past presidents have resisted congressional oversight. Furthermore, the House did a half-assed job - at best - of pursuing that oversight. In their hysterical rush to impeach by Christmas, they forfeited any real opportunity to examine the witnesses and documents they craved. Trump didn't defeat them. They did it to themselves.

History is being rewritten in real time.  The political status quo must be protected at all cost.  If facts get in the way, there are alternatives.

You tRump supporters live in a world of alternate facts and alternate reality.  

You tRump supporters live in a world of alternate facts and alternate reality.  

Apparently so.  Maybe liberals need to spend more money on rural education?  

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The impeachment process appears to have continued a years long process of tilting the balance of power within Washington toward the executive branch and away from Congress. The president asserted his right to hold up, at least temporarily, legally appropriated foreign-aid funds for Ukraine, and then to resist all congressional attempts to subpoena witnesses and documents in the subsequent investigation. Lawmakers from Mr. Trump’s party defended the chief executive’s right to resist congressional oversight, a precedent that won’t be forgotten. By arguing, as Sen. Lamar Alexander did in opposing calling witness to the Senate trial, that Mr. Trump’s actions in pressuring Ukraine were wrong but not impeachable, Republicans may have both clarified and pushed outward the line for any future impeachment effort.

Seems that the author missed out on Clinton resisting investigation during his impeachment? The Democrats had the exact same chance in the House to go to court to compel testimony from those protected by EP; they failed to do so. That is not the Senate's fault; nor is it their job to call new witnesses. The Democrats fought tooth and nail to have no witnesses called during the Clinton impeachment in the Senate. Instead they only had 3 witnesses that were already called by the House- none of them were live- they watched the House interview tapes. 

The author also fails to take into account not one Democrat thought Clinton was innocent. They simply converted real crimes into talking points. It wasn't perjury- Clinton lied about sex; it wasn't obstruction of justice (witness tampering)- it was a vast right wing conspiracy.

Head the written word of Chuck (massive hypocrite) Schumer.

nypost

Mr. President, this is a day of solemnity and awe. I rise humbled that we are participating in a process that was mapped out more than 200 years ago by the Founding Fathers and that the words we say today will be looked upon by historians and future Congresses for guidance. That is quite a responsibility.

I began this process in the House where it degenerated quickly into bitter acrimony. I would like to say to Majority Leader [Trent] Lott and Minority Leader [Tom] Daschle, and to my new colleagues who have wrestled with this case, that I deeply appreciate your fairness and patience and the way this has been handled with such dignity in the Senate.

Growing up, our country and its government seemed like a mighty oak — strong, rooted, permanent, and grand.

It has shaken me that we stand at the brink of removing a President — not because of a popular groundswell to remove him and not because of the magnitude of the wrongs he’s committed — but because conditions in late 20th century America has made it possible for a small group of people who hate Bill Clinton and hate his policies to very cleverly and very doggedly exploit the institutions of freedom that we hold dear and almost succeed in undoing him.

Most troubling to me are the conditions that allowed this to happen, than the small group who precipitated them.

The small group is not the House Managers or particular officeholders of the Republican party.

It is the small group of lawyers and zealots who decided that they would invest time and money to exploit a personal weakness that people knew the President had, find a case to air it publicly, investigate the President’s private life to the point of obsession, and use it to bring him down.

So they found Paula Jones. And whether she was truly wronged or not, we all knew it was a politically motivated case. The people who financed it had no interest in helping Paula Jones. They never lifted a finger to fight for civil rights or for strong sexual harassment laws. It was opportunism pure and simple.

What is so profoundly disturbing is not that this small group of Clinton-haters hatched this plan. It’s that this group — or any group equally dogmatic and cunning — came so close to succeeding.

If you had asked me one year ago if people like this with such obvious political motives could use our courts, play the media and tantalize the legislative branch to achieve their ends of bringing down the President, I would have said “not a chance — that doesn’t happen in America.”

But it almost happened. And in the future it could be a left wing zealous organization or another right wing group or some other group with strong narrow beliefs.

We’ve got to understand how we’ve reached the point where any small group could have so much power.

Of course, mechanically, we can point to a myriad of bad decisions that brought us to the brink.

In all due respect Mr. Chief Justice, the Supreme Court allowed the Paula Jones suit to go forward arguing that it would not lead to politically motivated cases against future presidents and that the case was unlikely to occupy a substantial amount of the President’s time. What a miscalculation. The next President, even if he or she is a saint, will be sued 25 times if we don’t change the law.

Judge Webber Wright ruled that the Jones attorneys were entitled to depose any state or federal employee with whom the President may have had sexual relations. That’s a fishing license.

Ken Starr, the Independent Counsel, was chosen despite a known and documented bias against the President. He behaved like a special prosecutor; not the even-handed, down-the-middle counsel the law required.

But there is something deeper and more troubling at work than the individual mistakes and decisions by the courts and the personal behavior of the President and the Independent Counsel.

What Bill Clinton did was wrong and arrogant — we all agree. We are all angered.

But let’s express some sympathy.

Bill Clinton is an extraordinary but flawed individual. But so are many other revered leaders, including other presidents. And when we knew about their flaws or suspected as much, we didn’t make that a cause celebre — not because we condoned whatever character flaw they might possess, but because we realize that none of us are superhuman.

Enlarge Image https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/schumer.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=640 640w, thenypost.files.wordpress 1280w, thenypost.files.wordpress 600w" > The original letter written by Schumer in 1999

We are all flawed. “Let him without sin cast the first stone” is no more a cliche today than it was almost 2,000 years ago.

This democracy would not exist if only the perfect among us were allowed to contribute.

Put yourself, put any of us in Bill Clinton’s position — where your enemy is trying to expose your most embarrassing private flaw. Where they find a way to use the most public venue to humiliate you. Where they put you in front of a civil court of law in what seems to you to be a bogus, politically motivated case that should have never seen the light of day.

How would you react? Would you do what Bill Clinton did by trying to walk up to the line of perjury without crossing it? What would be going through your mind? Would you be thinking about the humiliation? Your family? The ridicule?

Bill Clinton really believes that he went up to that line and didn’t cross it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

It’s a little arrogant on our part to think any one of us could be so certain that if we saw the very real possibility that everything we loved in our lives — and I don’t mean our jobs — but everything we really cherish to the core, burst into supernova on network television, that we wouldn’t consider trying to walk the same line Bill Clinton walked.

There are many of us in politics and many in the media who carry on and opine as if we and they are perfect.

We’re not.

Maybe we’re seeking an impossible duality. We demand, as we should, that our elected leaders be held to the highest standard. And then we shine the brightest light imaginable to expose those who don’t measure up.

But, of course, no one can meet that standard, particularly under the blinding bright glare of late 20th century light.

There is a fundamental question our society must address — how do we keep our standards high but at the same time accept, as the Founding Fathers did, that our leaders are only human.

Related to this is a second underlying cause that has allowed this small group of zealots to almost undo the President.

It seems we have lost the ability to forcefully advocate for our position without trying to criminalize or at least dishonor our adversaries — often over matters having nothing to do with the public trust. And it is hurting the country; it is marginalizing and polarizing the Congress.

In today’s environment, it would be easy, but wrong, for Democrats to lay the blame for this predicament simply on a narrow band of right-wing zealots out to destroy Bill Clinton.

It would be easy, but wrong, for Republicans to say that the only reason Bill Clinton survived this scandal is a strong economy.

What began 25 years ago with Watergate as a solemn and necessary process to force a President to adhere to the rule of law, has grown beyond our control so that now we are routinely using criminal accusations and scandal to win the political battles and ideological differences we cannot settle at the ballot box.

Both parties are to blame.

In what was close to a mirror image of this case — John Tower was a tremendous senator and was perfectly capable of serving our nation as Defense Secretary. He was ruined in a political feeding frenzy that was meant to shame him.

Newt Gingrich came to power by destroying others. He was destroyed by the same means.

The ledger is pretty much even between the two parties, but it has become more partisan and bitter. It is reminiscent of the Oresteia, a trilogy of ancient Greek plays by Aeschylus.

In the Oresteia, the warring factions of the House of Atreus trapped themselves in an escalating chain of revenge such that at the end of the chain, Atreus served his brother a pie that contained his own brother’s murdered children. Each side escalated until both sides were destroyed.

We risk our Congress becoming a House of Atreus.

In conclusion, we have all been shaken by these last six months, but there are two glowing beacons of optimism — two strong oaks that still stand mightily.

The first is the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Every year I live, and every year I serve I am ever increasingly amazed at their wisdom and genius.

They didn’t know there would be political parties, but a simple mathematical fraction — two-thirds — a two-thirds majority in the “cooling saucer of the Senate” meant that removal of a President from office would have to involve more than the whims of a narrow band of politicians.

We walked up to the abyss and it was simply the elegant mathematics of the Founding Fathers that kept us from going over.

They have pulled America back from the brink of future chaos that might have occurred if we removed the President for human frailties and low crimes. God bless the Founding Fathers.

The second oak is the American people. They are not necessarily as informed as we are on the intricate particularities of this case. They didn’t follow every twist and turn. They knew that what the President did was wrong.

But they knew that the President’s wrongdoing reflected human frailty rather than malevolence or any abuse of power or duty. They knew from their common sense wisdom that this did not rise to the level of impeachment and removal either as defined by the Constitution or as defined by their common sense of justice, fairness, and right and wrong. They knew that if they were in Clinton’s shoes, they weren’t sure how they would react.

Many of my colleagues excoriate any mention of the polls. But my colleagues on this side of the aisle have cited the polls not as politicians putting their fingers in the wind, but as a measure of what the American people feel.

In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, that is a legitimate consideration in deciding whether a President should be removed. And for six months, the American people in every segment of the country have been unwavering in their view that the President should not be removed.

They remain unshakable in their belief that the Congress, the Courts, and the press had gone too far. They were the only, truly rational actor in the whole drama. God bless them.

The people and the founders are the twin oaks that stand tall amidst this sad episode of American history. But if the cycle of political recrimination and scandalizing continues, the American people will become more alienated and cynical and shaken by the political process and they, too, will lose faith in the great instrument the Founding Fathers have given us.

If it gets to the point where the American people become too cynical we could lose it all.

After this is over let’s end the recriminations. Let’s not blame Ken Starr, or bash the President, or scapegoat the House Managers. Let’s instead think about what brought us to this point.

Let us shake hands and say we are now going to forego bringing down people for political gain. Let us understand that our leaders have foibles, and though we must be held to a higher standard, let us not make it a sport to expose those weaknesses.

The American people have saved us from ourselves. Let’s not ask them to do it too many more times.

Schumer should be choking on his current words. He was the divisive side in the Clinton impeachment- and now he is to use his own words.

It has shaken me that we stand at the brink of removing a President — not because of a popular groundswell to remove him and not because of the magnitude of the wrongs he’s committed — but because conditions in late 20th century America has made it possible for a small group of people who hate Bill Clinton and hate his policies to very cleverly and very doggedly exploit the institutions of freedom that we hold dear and almost succeed in undoing him.

Schumer, Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic mob have less honor than Trump. That is saying a ton.

Seems that the author missed out on Clinton resisting investigation during his impeachment? The Democrats had the exact same chance in the House to go to court to compel testimony from those protected by EP; they failed to do so. That is not the Senate's fault; nor is it their job to call new witnesses. The Democrats fought tooth and nail to have no witnesses called during the Clinton impeachment in the Senate. Instead they only had 3 witnesses that were already called by the House- none of them were live- they watched the House interview tapes. 

But that's not important.  The important thing to sell a story that fits today's conventional wisdom.  History is dry, boring, and irrelevant to the task at hand.

The whole impeachment has been motivated by politics; not facts, truth, the Constitution, or the rule of law.  Democrats have demonstrated they will sell their souls for a few political points.  But that debt to the devil can't be ignored; the devil will have his due.

Clinton actually testified under oath, and they got evidence.  Try another fake defense of the criminal in the WH.

Clinton did not testify during the impeachment process.

Clinton actually testified under oath, and they got evidence.  Try another fake defense of the criminal in the WH.

And Clinton actually committed a legal infraction that was the basis for articles of impeachment.  I don't recall Clinton being impeached for using the Lincoln bedroom to obtain political donations.  Remember China gate?  As Alan Dershowitz argued, politics is not an adequate justification for impeachment.

Did I say that Clinton testified during the process?  I said Clinton testified under oath.   Now refute that. Trump can't and never will.

No, Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow job, period.  If they had more they would have used it.  They started with Whitewater and ended with the blow.   And of course, my statement of Clinton testifying under oath is true,  and  evidence AND witnesses came out in the Senate trial, including Monica, also TRUE.

Give up the Dershbag arguments.  Nobody agrees with him, he is a defense whore, follow the money and the new position will follow.  Go find some scholars and experts that agree with him, and we can compare them with those who think he is full of crap.

While Trump may not be thrown out of office at this point, the blatant crimes that he has committed against America as its President, as well as those as an American citizen, he will still have to face them once he leaves the WH. 

The down side to this is that, knowing that he will face the crimes he has committed before and after being elected President, he will likely do all he can to declare himself the Dictator of America and refuse to leave the WH if he is elected to a second term, which is still not a done deal. 

While it is most likely that all the Trump supporters here on NT will be more than happy to have him become a dictator of America, there are many Americans who would not be willing to see that happen. 

So it will be fun to see how it all works out from here.