Impeaching the President: Good Idea or Bad?

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (Politico)

It appears that the attack against the United States Capital building last week was not at all spontaneous. It was planned. Although it ultimately failed in achieving its goals, it succeeded in doing something that was inconceivable: breeching the walls of congress. Scary as that was to witness, it never came close to being a coup de’tat. 

Why did they succeed to the extent that they did? I believe that law enforcement at all levels simply did not believe something like this could happen here. The United States is not a banana republic or a two bit dictatorship. It is the most successful and strongest democracy in the world. Whatever differences we citizens may have ever had with our government, we never came close to trying to overthrow it. No matter how politically divided we were, when the votes were in, we accepted them. Some of us enthusiastically and some of us reluctantly. But all of us accepted them and went on with our lives.

Of course there were always fringe elements in this country that did not accept the results or anything else about our government. With threats about a violent coup. But no one took them seriously. They were too minuscule to execute anything like that against the most powerful nation on earth - by far. 

The entire country was taken by surprise last week. It actually could happen here. The attempt at doing so got a lot further than anyone ever dreamed. 

What this says to me is right wing fringe groups consisting of racists and antisemites in this country are a lot bigger and stronger than I – or probably anyone in government – ever thought. Many of them belong to private militias and have trained in elite military units. And they are armed with military grade weapons.

So why did they decide to plan and execute their attack now? I think we all know the answer to that.    These ragtag militias united under the banner of our Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. His behavior over the past four years solidified them into the mob that attacked the US Capital building last week.

The fact that this was planned long before last Wednesday does not exonerate the President. He is still to blame for incitement. He didn’t know about their plan, but he nevertheless unwittingly gave them the green light execute it. On that very day. They could not have asked for a better permit. They attacked on behalf of their leader, the President. It does however exonerate the majority of the President’s supporters who showed up there to protest what they (erroneously) believed was a stolen election. They are not to blame. 

The fallout of this has been humongous. We are still feeling the reverberations. Both here and abroad. But we are not done yet. The most immediate threat by these people is their promise to stage armed protests in every state capital on inauguration day. 

Armed protest! If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what does. And although I am not aware of any actual threat to President-elect Biden on that day, there is every reason to be prepared for the worst. 

I suspect that this time the government will be a lot better prepared. As will state governments. If there is any kind of silver lining in this, it is that the coalescence of all these right wing extremist factions can finally be dealt  with in a more substantial way all at once. My hope is that the vast majority of them will be arrested, tried, and convicted of crimes that carry very long prison terms. 

With the President carrying so much of the responsibility here, the question arises about whether he should be removed from office. Ordinarily I might answer in the affirmative. The President should not get a pass on what he has been responsible for ever  since he occupied the Oval Office – culminating with the attack on the Capital building last week. 

To that end there have been calls by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to invoke the 25^th Amendment. That would allow the majority of the Presdient’s cabinet to declare him unfit to serve - and hand over the Presidency to Vice President Mike Pence. Who would then become the 46^th President of the United States until the inauguration. Pence has already said he will not do that. 

Short of that the next step would be impeachment. But removing the President from office before the inauguration is a near impossibility. Even if a divided senate could get enough Republicans to go along with it. Which is unlikely even now.

I personally think it is a terrible idea. The one thing we don’t need at this juncture is more divisiveness. that will surely be one consequence of it. The fact is that the issues that motivated nearly half the country to vote for Trump are still there. While many Trump voters do not approve of what happened last week and realize the President’s part in it, they still support many of his policies. Impeaching him will not unite the country. It will further divide it (if that’s even possible). 

Not only that but an impeachment trial that will surely last well beyond inaugurations day. time that would be better spent doing the business of the Amercian people they were elected to do.  The new administration has a lot on their plate. There are a lot of things that need attention that are far more important than punishing a man who will be gone in 8 days. 

Congress ought to be thinking about things like getting more people vaccinated, The current slow pace is appalling and unacceptable. The layer upon layer of who gets to be vaccinated ahead of who has slowed thigs down to a snails pace. Instead of limiting who gets vaccinated first second and third, the government should be vaccinating as many people as they can - as fast as they can. An impeachment trial will not help expedite vaccinations. 

Perhaps the most important thing congress should be focusing on instead of punishing the lamest of ducks is trying to unite the country. That might seem like an impossibility at this point. But it need not be. If Biden is true to his promise of trying to do that, he can begin by being the centrist Democrat his record in the senate has shown him to have been. If he is smart he might want to look at some of the things Trump has done that bore positive fruit and caused so many people to vote for him. And expand on them. Instead of undoing them. 

He might lose some liberal support. But that would be more than replalced by the centrists votes he would gain. Which would in my view begin to heal the country. 

I would hope that those among us that were diehard Trump supporters give the new President a chance to keep his word about uniting the country. Wouldn’t it be nice if did and we could go back to defining ourselves as Americans instead of liberals and conservatives?