There’s so much information about the impeachment of Donald Trump that it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees given the constantly-bloated 24-hour news cycle that surrounds our President. There are a few important things that We The People need to understand at this point in the game: how the impeachment process works, what Trump is being accused of having done wrong, and how the political party machines will try to use the whole charade to their benefit. Once you understand those things in context, you can begin to form your own educated opinions about how our congressional leaders and executives are conducting themselves, and whether or not the President deserves to be impeached.
On The Process
The most fundamental thing to understand is how the impeachment process works. I am no legal expert, but there’s a common misconception that impeachment IS the act of removing a President from office, when in reality, impeachment is a step in a process that can lead to the removal of the President. The first step in the impeachment process is for the House of Representatives to conduct an investigation into whether the President (or other public officer) may have done something wrong. If they find evidence that he or she has done something wrong, whether it be a criminal act or behaving in a manner inconsistent with their office, the House Judiciary Committee will draft articles of impeachment.* The articles of impeachment are the legal documents asserting that the President has done something wrong, and explaining what they are being charged with. After these articles are drafted, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a vote to determine whether they should be advanced to the full HOR for consideration. If they vote no, the process is over, but if they vote yes, then the whole House will vote on whether or not to “impeach” the President. If they vote no, again, the process ends. If they vote yes (a simple majority is sufficient), the president will have been officially “impeached”, but that doesn’t mean that he will be removed from office, necessarily. If he is impeached, then the Senate takes over the process, because they’re the chamber of Congress responsible for holding a trial of the President to determine whether he is guilty of what he is accused of in the articles of impeachment. After the trial, the full Senate will vote on whether or not the President is guilty and should be removed from office. A two-thirds majority is required to remove the President from office, at which point, the Vice President would become the President.
*It’s important to note that an impeachable offense does not necessarily have to be a specific crime, but it must meet the one of the three descriptions laid out by the founding fathers in the constitution, which include “treason”, “bribery”, and “other high crimes and misdemeanors”.
What Trump is Accused Of
In the case of Donald Trump, the House Judiciary Committee has drafted two articles of impeachment, and this morning, the committee voted 23-17 to advance them to the full House of Representatives for consideration and a vote, which will likely take place next week. The two articles of impeachment against President Trump accuse him of “abuse of power” and “obstruction of congress”, which are both offenses that can be categorized as “other high crimes and misdemeanors”. The articles of impeachment are freely available on the internet, and anyone who wants to discuss this impeachment process should read them. Click here to download a PDF version. They’re only 9 pages long, and there’s really no excuse not to read them. Here is a summary of the contents and implications of each article, with necessary context:
Article One — The first article of impeachment brought against Trump charges him with with “abuse of power”. This is the article that defines the offense that kicked off this whole impeachment process. A lot of people probably assume that the impeachment has something to do with allegations of collusion by the Trump campaign with the Russian operatives who interfered in the 2016 election, but this is not the case. Article one is narrow in scope, focusing solely on the much more recent issue of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to an anonymous whistleblower, Trump leveraged U.S. military aid to Ukraine (aid which we’ve been providing for years) on Zelensky’s willingness to open an investigation into the activities of Hunter Biden (the son of former Vice President and 2020 Presidential candidate, Joe Biden), whom Trump believed was guilty of corruption and a beneficiary of nepotism based on his position on the Board of Directors for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings (Hunter Biden had no experience in the energy industry when he took the board seat). The concern here is that, even if Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were guilty of corruption, Presidents still aren’t allowed to seek help from foreign governments in elections, which is likely the reason Trump wanted dirt on Biden (who is one of the top polling candidates who may oppose Trump in the 2020 general election). The benefit of the doubt, in this case, is fairly weak. That argument is that perhaps Trump was only interested in fighting corruption, but starting with his biggest political opponent seems like a convenient choice when Trump hadn’t requested any other foreign governments to initiate investigations of any other potentially corrupt American citizens.
Article Two — The second article of impeachment charges Trump with “obstruction of Congress”, and relates to his conduct during the House’s investigation. The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the “sole power of impeachment”, and under this constitutional power, they have to authority to subpoena witness testimony, records, and any other evidence that would be useful in determining whether to impeach the President. The White House, under Trump’s authority, submitted a letter to the House leaders stating their unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation, saying that it was “illegitimate” because the full House of Representatives didn’t vote on whether or not to impeach the President before conducting their investigation. This seems (and is) ridiculous; it is the equivalent of asking for an indictment decision before the police officers/investigators are allowed to collect any evidence. Indeed, Trump did completely refuse to comply, handing over none of the requested documents and prohibiting those who work for him to testify, thereby infringing the HOR’s Constitutional right to collect such evidence to conduct their “sole power of impeachment”.
Things To Consider
Given that America is so divided over President Trump, it’s important to look at this from both sides.
While a lot of angry, ill-informed Democrats have been shouting “impeachment” since Trump won the election, congressional Democrats were slow to actually initiate the impeachment process against President Trump. Of course, some will say this is because they had no concrete evidence, while others will say it was merely a strategic decision by Nancy Pelosi.
Of course, there is some degree of truth to both of those claims. Conclusive evidence that Trump colluded with the Russian operatives who influenced the 2016 election never surfaced. To many Trump supporters, in the wake of the long and unsuccessful campaign to oust him over the whole “Russian Collusion” fiasco, the whole issue of him having allegedly abused his power in the Ukraine case feels like it’s been a blitz attack by Democrats, carried out swiftly and recklessly with the sole hope of removing him from office, regardless of the facts. However, anyone smart enough to have ended up in Congress can see how this is likely to play out: the House of Representatives will impeach Donald Trump, and then he’ll be acquitted by the Senate. As far as the political fallout, it could really go either way. It could enrage Democrats and moderates who feel that the claims against Trump were unfairly dismissed, and drive them to vote in record numbers in 2020. It could also make Republicans and those who have always supported Donald Trump feel vindicated, and drive them to support him even more passionately.
However, the Democrats are rightly pointing out that even if you think you’ve been unfairly charged with something, you don’t get to just skip your court date and ignore subpoenas; I recently got a traffic ticket for making an illegal left turn in an intersection where there was no posted signage prohibiting my left turn. I think it’s extremely unfair, but I still have to go through the proper legal channels to prove my innocence, I can’t simply refuse to participate in the legal process altogether, because those are crimes of their own, and in Trump’s case, they directly impede the House’s “sole power of impeachment”. The biggest issue here is not what happened with Ukraine, though that is problematic, if true. The big issue here is that Trump, by refusing to cooperate with the legally conducted impeachment inquiry and instructing those beneath him to also refuse to cooperate, he is directly challenging the separation of powers and usurping power from the House of Representatives, regardless of whether the allegations from Article One were valid. This, if not punished, would set a dangerous precedent that gives the executive branch more power than the legislative branch, which is directly contrary to the form of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. When our Constitution was drafted, the authors sought to separate power equally between three distinct branches with a system of checks and balances so that no branch could amass more power than the two, because when that happens, the entire republic is placed on a slippery slope that can lead to dictatorship. That may sound dramatic, but let us not forget that Adolf Hitler rose to power by being elected democratically, and then usurping power by delegitimizing and weakening the German legislative body.
Next week, the full House of Representatives will vote on whether or not Trump should be formally charged with the offenses listed in the articles of impeachment. You may be wondering why the evidence against Trump isn’t abundantly clear at this point, given that the HOR vote to impeach him is the next step in the process. To use the earlier analogy of a criminal trial, at this point in the process, evidence has been collected and we’re waiting on an indictment — evidence, in any legal case, impeachment or otherwise, wouldn’t necessarily become public until it is brought up in the actual trial — so despite the fact that there seems to be little evidence in support of Article One, in fact we just don’t know what that is, both because the Trump administration refused to provide any, and the small number of witnesses who testified to the House Judiciary Committee had no legal obligation to do so publicly. It is also worth noting that there is one piece of solid evidence which could immediately exonerate the President, though it has only been partially released. The White House, naturally, keeps records of all of Trump’s phone calls, but so far they have only provided a “rough transcript” of his call with the Ukrainian President during which the alleged abuse of power occurred. Now, “rough transcript” is little more than an oxymoron: either the transcript provided is exact or it is a summary, there is no such thing as a “rough transcript”.
If the full House of Representatives does vote to impeach, Donald Trump will become the third President in United States history to actually have been impeached.
A formal trial would then take place in the Senate. After both sides have had the opportunity to provide evidence and testimony, the Senate will vote on whether or not the President deserves to be removed from office based on the results of the trial they conduct. However, it’s very unlikely that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will conduct anything resembling a just trial. He has remarked that he wants the whole process to be very quick, allegedly for the sake of expediency, although it seems more likely that he hopes to prevent the President from digging himself into an even deeper hole during his testimony to the Senate. McConnell went so far as to state that allowing either side to call witnesses would be “mutually assured destruction”.
Given the deep partisan divide in Congress right now and the fact that the Republicans have the majority (with 53 seats; the Democrats have 45, and there are two independents), it is highly unlikely that 20 Republicans (the number needed to reach the two-thirds majority needed to remove Trump, assuming all of the Democrats and independents vote for removal) would break rank with the rest of their (usually) pro-Trump party. However, this could serve as an out for a silent faction of Republican Senators who think Trump is doing irreparable damage to their party, and in that case, a landslide could happen quite suddenly. The odds are extremely low, but the political situation in America is so volatile that we would be remiss not to consider all possibilities.
At the end of the day, it is most likely that Donald Trump will be impeached but not removed, though that doesn’t mean that the whole process will have been for naught. Donald Trump is a parasite to our nation, and historians will look back on this moment in history as a turning point, and they will place the blame at the feet of the Senators who refused to conduct a just trial and convict him for the offense(s) of which he is admittedly guilty, offenses which will lead to the destabilization of our federal government and the eventual collapse of our republic.
UPDATED: 12/14/19; 09:50
