{"id":400993,"date":"2019-03-23T14:18:20","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T13:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-not-impeach\/"},"modified":"2019-03-23T14:18:20","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T13:18:20","slug":"why-not-impeach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-not-impeach\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Not Impeach?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_108605\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-108605\" src=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/01\/18F70C31-2531-475E-A58A-BFAD73921370.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"344\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-108605\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>What sensate, morally decent human being could fail to appreciate newly elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib\u2019s call \u201cto impeach the motherfucker!\u201d\u00a0 She was referring of course, to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<p>What her words, taken literally, call for is a formal indictment, rendered by the House of Representatives that would lead to a trial in the United States Senate. \u00a0Conviction at trial, not impeachment by itself, would make Trump\u2019s removal from office legally mandatory.<\/p>\n<p>Tlaib surely knows this and so, most likely, do most of the tens of millions of Americans who agree with her and support the stand she took.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, when they call for impeachment, what they are really calling for is not impeachment per se, but the initiation of a process that, if successful, would cause the Donald to be gone in the way that the Constitution prescribes.<\/p>\n<p>This assumes that Trump, his minions, and his supporters, a third or more of the population, don\u2019t resort to extra-Constitutional means to hold onto power; or that, if they do, that their efforts fail.<\/p>\n<p>Before Trump, the idea that an American president might defy the Constitution by seeking to hold onto power by force was unthinkable.\u00a0 Most people nowadays still think it is; and they are probably right.\u00a0 With Trump, however, anything, no matter how perfidious, is possible.<\/p>\n<p>Were Trump gone, a process of de-Trumpification could begin. Not all the harm he has\u00a0done, and will go on to do as long as he remains&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2019\/03\/22\/why-not-impeach\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair What sensate, morally decent human being could fail to appreciate newly elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib\u2019s call \u201cto impeach the motherfucker!\u201d\u00a0 She was referring of course, to Donald Trump. What her words, taken literally, call for is a formal indictment, rendered by the House of Representatives that would lead to a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-400993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}