(ThyBlackMan.com) This week, most of the television cable stations are focusing on impeachment when they aren’t doing Mueller’s speech. Should there be impeachment?
One person who I know and respect says that unless President Trump is impeached, he will win the 2020 election. CNN says: “Professor Allan Lichtman, the man who has correctly predicted the last nine presidential elections, said President Trump is on track for another term unless Democrats do what is “politically right” and impeach him. In an interview with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday, he said, “It’s a false dichotomy to say Democrats have a choice between doing what is right and what is constitutional, and what is politically right. Impeachment is also politically right … unless the Democrats grow a spine and do their constitutional duty and move into an impeachment inquiry.”
The interview with Lichtman continued:
Right now, based on my system, there has to be six negative factors against the party holding the White House, the Trump party to predict their defeat. They’re down only three. But an impeachment would nail down the scandal key, a fourth key, it might trigger other keys like a real challenge to his re-nomination or a third party, enough to defeat him.
And let’s not forget, impeachment is not just a vote in the House. It involves public hearings, as part of the impeachment inquiry. And what everyone forgets, a public trial in the Senate in which House prosecutors present evidence, present documents, make opening and closing statements. Now Richard Nixon before the public revelations was at 67 percent approval.
I don’t know what impeachment will do, unless it allows the obtaining of various documents that were previously unobtainable.
As a journalist I believe in transparency. I think there should be few government secrets; so if impeachment is the only way to get to the documents, then the Congress should do it. We know the Nixon tapes were the things that led to his resignation. That was a good thing, despite the fact that on foreign policy, it is difficult to fault him.
Our president should be someone most Americans look up to. I do not agree that President Trump’s tweets in the past few days say that Russia was not responsible for his winning. Clearly, he did not mean that Russia was responsible for his winning in 2016. He would never have tweeted that, and the press knows it. It is irrelevant, and we know it was not what he believed or he would not have written that in a tweet.
There are several groups advocating for impeachment. They are calling for all kinds of reasons, from obstruction of justice, violating the emoluments clause to getting the Justice Department to go after political enemies to abusing pardon power such as pardoning Sheriff Arizona Joseph Arpaio (what about Bill Clinton pardoning Mark Rich?).
Many people believe Congress functions as a grand jury. It weighs the evidence and then decides. The advantage of an impeachment hearing is that Americans who did not read the 400+ pages of the Mueller report could tune into the television/radio and hear what is being said. For those of us older folks, we remember listening to the Nixon hearings. It made a huge difference.
I am a liberal Democrat, and the only reason that I think we should impeach is to get documents. The president was elected and we have a chance to get him out of office in 2020. However, we do need to see all the documents, especially if President Trump obstructed justice. If impeachment is the only way to legally get them, then OK.
Otherwise, people who voted for President Trump knew what they were getting. They can vote him out if they choose. There is less than a year and a half until the election. Nixon had two and a half years to go when he resigned. Even if Trump were impeached, my guess is he would have a year left. Is it worth it?
Presidents lie, we know that. You can’t be a politician in this day and age and not lie. However, does that mean you impeach a president for lying? (Bill Clinton was impeached and he lied about sex with Monica Lewinsky.)
The only reason to move for impeachment is to get our hands on the documents. Americans can then decide for themselves. That is how our Democracy was set up and that is how it should be.
Written by Ellen Ratner
Official website; http://twitter.com/ellenratner
