When will Trump get impeached?

[Moiraine]

[schriznoeder]

I just about spit out my beer! Funniest thing I've seen all day.

[schriznoeder]

[knapplc]

Keep the ball rolling. Not that I want Pence, but he (at least) seems to know the job well enough not to make the mistakes Trump is making.

 

 

 

[TGHusker]

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/17/jack-welch-impeachment-of-trump-would-blow-the-market-away.html

 

Jack Welch chimes in on CNBC:

 

Welch gives Trump a "D minus" on his management of the White House but an "A" on the policy front and in his Cabinet and Supreme Court picks.

• He says he'd also give Trump an "A" for boosting morale among businesses and consumers.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric who has President Donald Trump's ear, told CNBC on Wednesday that an impeachment would crush the stock market.

"An impeachment proceeding would blow the market away," Welch said on "Squawk Box."

Welch also said Trump's firing of James Comey as FBI director was a "rookie mistake." He added, "You don't make any friends doing it the way [Trump] did it."

"I think without question we have a guy that's on the right agenda with crappy management practices," Welch said, giving the president a "D minus" on his management skills.

Trump needs to unite all the different factions in the White House, get to the bottom of the media leaks, and get back to his message of "Make America Great Again," he added.

While no fan Barack Obama's policies, Welch said the former president ran a tight ship. "They spoke with one voice."

The botched Comey firing is an example of Trump's inexperience in running a bureaucracy, the executive chairman of Jack Welch Management Institute said.

[TGHusker]

That is the funniest I've seen in a long time. I at first didn't notice the baby's face and then I DID!

[Atbone95]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

[BigRedBuster]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

You do for obstructing justice.

 

Now, I do agree with Ryan on that we need to take a deep breath and make sure we know exactly what the facts are and be unbiased when we see those facts.

 

But, right now, it's not looking good.

 

I would absolutely love to see Trump testify the similar to the way clinton did in 1998 under oath.

[Branno]

After the election, I kept hearing people ask this question, and my answer was always "He'll probably do what it takes to serve his 4 years and go away."

 

After this past week? I have almost no doubt he will be impeached, and it will happen after the midterms when a Democratic Congress gets elected.

[RedDenver]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

Keep in mind that impeachment is for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors", but what constitutes those crimes is entirely up to the Congress to decide. It's like a lot of things the Founding Fathers did: left it in a gray area so each generation of Americans can interpret based on their own times and circumstances.

 

Also, Trump has been in clear violation of the emoluments clause, which is alone could be grounds for impeachment. And that's before we get to what involvement Trump has with a foreign power (Russia), which the Congress could decide is an impeachable offense. And that's before we get to possible obstruction of an investigation, which could also be an impeachable offense.

 

There's certainly a lot of gray area in interpretation of the law, but the evidence that Trump isn't doing things in the best interests of America is mounting.

[TGHusker]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

Stupid may fall under Section 4 of amendment 25 as he may be considered totally unfit for the office he holds.

This OP-Ed agrees with me from the NYT -not my favorite rag but when they are right, they are right and you have to be adult enough to look at the reality of the current situation.

 

FIRST SECTION FOUR:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

 

NOW PART OF THE OP-ED

 

One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

 

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent — charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be.

There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne.

It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors. It is a child who asks the head of the F.B.I. why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. It is a child who does not understand the obvious consequences of his more vindictive actions — like firing the very same man whom you had asked to potentially obstruct justice on your say-so.

A child cannot be president. I love my children; they cannot have the nuclear codes.

But a child also cannot really commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” in any usual meaning of the term. There will be more talk of impeachment now, more talk of a special prosecutor for the Russia business; well and good. But ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase. I do not believe he is really capable of the behind-the-scenes conspiring that the darker Russia theories envision. And it is hard to betray an oath of office whose obligations you evince no sign of really understanding or respecting.

 

Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the cabinet’s judgment.

The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. He has not endured an assassination attempt or suffered a stroke or fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

 

This will not get better. It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify.

 

There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on. Right now, though, I will be boring in my sincerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to reconsider their support for a man who never should have had his party’s nomination, never should have been elevated to this office, never should have been endorsed and propped up and defended by people who understood his unfitness all along.

Now is a day for redemption. Now is an acceptable time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/opinion/25th-amendment-trump.html?_r=0

[Nebfanatic]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

failure to divest from business ties and using his position to benefit family business is not something that is or should be allowed imo, so I think there are some legitimate reasons to impeach. Obviously impeachment rumors wouldn't be going this far if he is assumed to have done nothing illegal.

[Enhance]

I posted in a status, but that will probably get lost.

 

No, I'm not crazy. No, I don't agree with the sh#t Trump is pulling. But he's what we've got.

 

He's done nothing illegal. And frankly, as much as you all whine about it (and I can agree on some pieces), you don't get impeached for being stupid.

Your status update suggests you're supportive of what he's doing and what he's done.

 

I guess I can understand being irritated by the calls for impeachment, but are these people wrong? It's a legitimate legal option for removing a person from power who is unfit to do the job. It's not like people are clamoring for something unrealistic and archaic like a tar and feathering, or that people are saying the electoral college needs to be obliterated.

[TGHusker]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/trump-classified-data.html A few quotes from this op-ed:

Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.

“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” he told Time. “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech.

By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.

Which brings us to the reports that Trump betrayed an intelligence source and leaked secrets to his Russian visitors. From all we know so far, Trump didn’t do it because he is a Russian agent, or for any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 7-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires.

The Russian leak story reveals one other thing, the dangerousness of a hollow man.

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

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“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?”

And out of that void comes a carelessness that quite possibly betrayed an intelligence source, and endangered a country.

[Enhance]