“Trump will likely be impeached. And it will likely end his presidency—if not in the Senate, then in 2020.” –
The Nation: Impeachment is Winning
If you are in a betting mood, bet that Donald Trump will be impeached. And then bet that, one way or another, impeachment will spell the end of his presidency. This is not wishful thinking for Democrats who have never liked Trump. This is practical politics, rooted in precedents from past impeachments and in an understanding of the dire circumstance in which Trump and his defenders now find themselves. Impeachment is, at this point, a moral and constitutional duty. But it comes with a political equation, and that equation does not add up to good news for our embattled president.
You’re fired!!! A phrase made famous by a man now fully at risk of having his employment terminated by the legislative branch of the United States Government … and if not will run the risk of a humiliating national repudiation next year when Congress will be bypassed and citizen voters will take it from there.
“If we accept that this is an impeachment inquiry that is headed toward an impeachment vote, we should also accept that the House vote on articles of impeachment will define our politics going forward. Democrats need to adjust to this prospect—and prepare it.”
If he is still in office in November, 2020, Mr. Trump will have no appreciable electoral majority; will have no inside track to the same electoral college circumstances that allowed him victory despite losing the popular vote. The states that produced his electoral college victory by narrow margins in 2016 will more than likely go to any opponent running against him by margins approaching double digits.
“The US Constitution rests the awesome power of impeachment in the US House of Representatives. While no impeached president has ever been removed from office by the Senate, House votes to impeach, and even the threats of such votes, have a record of transforming American politics. Presidents who have been impeached—or who simply have been faced with the prospect of impeachment—have resigned and have decided against seeking reelection.
So what the House does matters. It is the essential step in holding a president to account.”
The man’s base has not grown in the 3 years and in fact has shrunk as more and more are waking up to reality. Trade wars, border walls, pretend foreign policy successes and tweets of silliness are backfiring as the President tries stubbornly and vainly to honor promises to his hard-core voting block that gave him a posture of legitimacy in 2016.
Most of those Boomers who voted for him out of a misplaced trust and expectation that his overstated “billionaire business-acumen” would change things economically for the better have gotten wise. There was never an intent to make things economically better for his fellow boomers – except those boomer CEO’s and wealthy donors who see in Trump a bottom line that keeps up their cash flows regardless of how the flows bleed away the economic lifeblood of the other 99%.
“That’s where the political equation comes in. Pelosi did not want to launch an impeachment inquiry. Nor did a number of other House Democrats who feared there might be political consequences for checking and balancing a lawless president. But the consequences need not be damaging to Democratic prospects. Indeed, they could, and should, be damaging to those who undermine the process and seek to avoid a scorchingly necessary reckoning.
What should now be beyond debate is that impeachment is the reality that will define the 2020 elections for the presidency, for Congress and for other positions.”
Trump’s political, economic and spiritual flatulence has stunk up too many places too many times. His evangelical base – as a voting block – is shrinking despite the public smoke-blowing of religious right public figures such as Franklin Graham, Falwell, the Prophet Pat Robertson along with the lesser bevy of self-righteous preeners.
They are the crew who would have us believe that God the Father has finally had enough. Up until 2016 God the Patriarchal Father had never intervened in our political and social disasters thereby preventing us from invading anyone, from bombing anyone, from not persecuting children, from not persecuting the indigent, from not persecuting the foreign born and non-white minorities; not to mention those whose sexual preferences don’t meet the pretended hatred of Old Wrathful Himself as found in any bigot’s Bible.
But in 2016, choosing the most openly vile presidential candidate we have ever seen as his so-called ” chosen instrument of righteousness” God made his divine will known. If Old Wrathful is so wise, why would the divine HE chose one of the least likeliest candidates to unite the people into a holy reverence for righteousness? It is the Evangelical Right who have helped stink up the place by hypocritically supporting our most openly blatant and immoral leader
Short of overriding the election itself, the idea that thoughtful, reasonable, discursive Americans would unquestioningly accept Dirty Dingus Magee just because evangelical propagandists said God had chosen him, the image of evangelical Christianity as a force for good in this country is most likely permanently marred.
The black eye of a Donald Trump as “Chosen President has also become the black eye of evangelical Christianity itself.
“If the 2020 choice is between Democrats who say they need to win in order to finally put an end to Trump’s abuses and to finish the miserable tenures of those senators who aid and abet his abuses, impeachment will not be a “third-rail” issue for the party. Democrats need to have the confidence of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she says that “the ground has shifted,” and that Democrats have the “ability to organize the public, to educate the public, to talk to the public” about the necessity of impeachment.
If they begin to do this now, and if they stay on message through 2020, impeachment will be a winning issue for their party, and for the republic.”
As has become obvious, many naive Boomers have no corner on the wisdom market and, in fact, have made of themselves a serious part of the problem.
This growing-up business is urgent and overdue. If the sitting president of the United States, his voting base and those evangelicals who continue to stand by him are the last to grow up (in the unlikely event they ever do) , it is up to the rest of us to take the measures necessary for the preservation of our political system.
Now!
Curmudgeon at Work 