Justice

Impeachment Primer: (Spoiler: Congress Is Full Of Cowards)

Donald Trump will commit impeachable offenses and not get impeached. Here's why.

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Real life. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Real life. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Most liberals seem stuck in the bargaining stage of grief. Bernie Sanders wants to work with President Trump on behalf of white people. Tulsi Gabbard wants to meet him on behalf of her own ambitions.

But once we move out of bargaining and into anger (I’ll keep your seat warm), we’ll move seriously into impeachment talks. Already, that word is being thrown around, and with good reason. But let’s talk a little bit about the impeachment process before we comfort ourselves with this pipe dream.

1. What Can Trump Be Impeached For?

Here’s the text from Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Trump has likely already committed impeachable offenses. And yes, you can impeach a person for something they’ve done before they took office (though that’s never been tried with a President). With Trump, you don’t even have to find a nebulous “high crime” like Republicans did with Bill Clinton. BRIBERY is right there in the text. Trump is already getting foreign diplomats to stay at his Washington, D.C. hotel which looks pretty bribe-y to me. There are massive conflicts of interest with his many businesses. And he’s already tried to extort Argentina.

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HE HASN’T EVEN TAKEN OFFICE YET! If Democrats don’t have articles of impeachment drafted up and sitting in a drawer by Inauguration Day, they simply aren’t doing their job. Finding impeachable offenses for Donald Trump will be the easy part.

2. Who Gets To Vote For Impeachment?

This is going to be the problem. Impeachment can be brought by a simple majority vote in the House of Representatives. Umm… have you all seen who controls the majority in the House of Representatives? On what planet are you living on where Paul Ryan leads a charge of #NeverTrump Republicans to impeach their own president? We just spent a year and a half watching elected Republicans cower to Trump when they thought he was going to lose. Now he’s won, he’s poised to fullfill all of their racist, sexist, homophobic fantasies, and they’re going to impeach him?

This is Paul Ryan we’re talking about, not Frank Underwood. Even if Ryan had Underwood’s brains, he certainly doesn’t have his balls.

The Democrats control 194 seats in Congress, and you’d need 218 votes to impeach. Even assuming that all the Democrats fell in line, you’d need 24 Republicans to jump ship and realize that Mike Pence was better for them than Donald Trump. Even if that’s exactly true — and if you are into sexist, homophobic policies as opposed to mere rhetoric, Pence is your guy — the chances that over 20 Republicans get together and find the stones they could not find on the campaign trail seems small to me.

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But that’s not all…

3. Impeachment Just Triggers A Trial, Who Votes To Convict?

Even the two presidents who were successfully impeached were not convicted and removed from office. That’s because the Senate is the “jury” in the ensuing trial (presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and you need two-thirds of Senators to vote to convict. That would require all 48 Democratic Senators, and 18 Republicans. Given what the Trump base just did for the Senate Republicans, there is a much better chance that they would send their wives and daughters to a Caligula-style orgy at Trump Tower than cross the assortment of bigots and sexists that keep them in power.

4. Have You Checked Out His Successor?

In the fever dream where Congress overcomes its cowardice, Mike Pence becomes President. Automatically. The Supreme Court can’t review a Senate conviction (Nixon — no, not that Nixon — v. U.S.) so the Senate’s judgement is final. That reality is baked into the impeachment votes of Congress.

Remember how I said “assuming” all the Democrats vote for impeachment? President Pence is a good reason to question that assumption. Now, I think that Pence is just a regular, good-ol’-boy Republican who will incrementally deny freedom and opportunities to those who don’t pray or kiss the way he likes. Republicans have been running that guy for years. Trump, on the other hand, is a white power candidate who has unleashed a wave of bigotry before even taking office. His power is a direct threat to blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Muslims. He’s an alleged sexual predator who endorses retrograde treatment of women. People will be assaulted and killed in Trump’s name. And that’s the best case body count for Trumpworld, because worst case we end up in a nuclear war.

Trump is worse, clearly, than Pence. But on the left — especially the white male left where people who are not targeted by Trump tell the rest of us how we should feel — it’s become fashionable to say that Pence is “just as bad” as Trump. “Maybe worse” because Pence will be more effective at pushing his agenda through.

It takes a certain amount of white privilege to create a false equivalency between Pence and Trump, but do I trust white, Democratic politicians to overcome their biases? No, I do not. I do not expect 100% support from Democrats to impeach Trump, especially if he is weakened by the myriad of impeachable offenses he is likely to commit.

And while Republican Congresspeople might largely prefer working with Pence, they also prefer staying in power. It seems clear that Trump is the only Republican who can fully capitalize on America’s racism to gain power.

We are not going to impeach Trump. Trump could commit an impeachable offense, on camera, then lie and say he didn’t do what we just saw him do, and Trump’s patsies in Congress would lap it up.

5. What Makes You Think Trump Would Leave?

You think that’s air you’re breathing? You still live in a world that has rules, which is why you’ll never be as strong or as fast as Trump will be in this place. America took the red f**king pill, we’re staying in Wonderland and we’re all about to find up just how deep this bigoted rabbit hole goes.

For foreign diplomats, Trump hotel is place to be [Washington Post]
Don’t let Donald Trump’s antics distract you from what’s really important [Vox]
Report: Trump pressed Argentina’s president about stalled building project [The Hill]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.

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