US President Donald J. Trump Impeachment Megathread - Democrats commit mass political suicide

RodgerDodger · 9 de Oct, 2019

Freedom Fries dijo:
Sorry if I missed it, but has the fact the "whistleblower" in addition to being a registered dem has work ties to a 2020 democrat candidate been discussed yet?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...professional-tie-to-2020-democratic-candidate

Instincts say it is probably Biden. Other rumors have put the Whistleblower as an analyst working the Ukrain desk during the Obama admin at the time Biden was taking the lead on all matters Ukraine.

Takayuki Yagami · 9 de Oct, 2019

Arctic Fox dijo:
I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.

I know a lot of people who feel this way. It's sad to see, but organizations only last so long. Everything has an expiration date.

I’ve been wondering for the past year or so how much of it is them hitting the expiration date and how much of it is that some of their shit were lies from the outset.

It's HK-47 dijo:
The only reason that the White House is able to tell them to fuck off is because they're still not sending subpoenas. I have no idea why everyone in the media keeps referring to them as subpoenas because they're not. There still hasn't been a vote, so there still isn't an inquiry. A subpoena can only be issued in regards to an ongoing case/investigation, they can't just be thrown at someone completely out of the blue to force them into testifying.

There isn't an actual case or investigation, so these are still nothing more than strongly-worded letters. If these were actually subpoenas then we'd more than likely see the White House and these administrators objecting to the issuance of the subpoena rather than ignoring them outright, and we'd also see the House members filing to hold these people in Contempt of Congress. You'd also see language similar to, "You are hereby commanded to report in person to the clerk of this court" somewhere in the letters that they've been sending.

I can't help but notice that none of these things have been happening, hence why whenever they send out a letter, Pompeo dunks it into a trash-can and you can always find the word "voluntary" somewhere in the request. If it's voluntary, it's not a subpoena.

They could also trudge up that ancient "Inherent Contempt" procedure from 1857, but given that they haven't sent the Sergeant-at-Arms to run out and start arresting people, that's not really happening either. Even if they wanted to go absolutely ass-mad nuclear on this whole ordeal and try to hold someone in Criminal Contempt of Congress, do you know who Congress would have to rely on to prosecute them?

Ver archivo adjunto 964011

He looks astoundingly like John Goodman in that picture.

Iwasamwillbe · 10 de Oct, 2019

Trump’s resistance to the impeachment inquiry is a genuine constitutional crisis

Here’s how bad things can get if Trump keeps stonewalling impeachment.

www.vox.com

https://archive.is/oIvNz

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent an eight-page-long middle finger to House Democratic leaders on Tuesday, pledging resistance to the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

As a legal matter, Cipollone’s letter is nonsense. Several court decisions make it clear that the White House is not above the law. Executive privilege is real, and it sometimes prevents some inquiries into presidential behavior, but it is not an absolute privilege — especially in the context of a criminal investigation.

As a practical matter, however, Trump is likely to get away with it because there’s no one who can stop him. House investigators and others may be able to obtain a court order requiring the White House to comply with an investigation. But if Trump continues to refuse, Congress and the courts have limited options.

As Alexander Hamilton once wrote of courts: the judiciary “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

The constitutional mechanism, meanwhile, for dealing with a lawless president — impeachment and conviction — requires at least 20 Republican senators to vote to remove a president of their own party.

So long as Trump believes that his fellow partisans will hang together, he has little incentive to comply with a court order.
The question of how to define a “constitutional crisis” is hotly contested among scholars. Yet one common definition, according to Georgetown law professor Victoria Nourse, is “a fight among branches of government in which neither side backs down, and there is no clear resolution within the constitutional system.”

There is no resolution to the present crisis within our constitutional system. The White House announced its clear intention to violate the law. But the only sure mechanism to enforce that law, impeachment, is a paper tiger so long as Republican senators stand with Trump.

The law does not permit Trump’s extraordinary resistance to investigations

Cipollone’s letter reads less like a legal document than it does like a Sean Hannity monologue. But he appears to be arguing that the Trump administration is free to defy congressional subpoenas because the House impeachment inquiry has not given Trump “constitutionally mandated due process” that he believes he is entitled to.

Trump’s legal position appears to be that no one in his administration is under any obligation to cooperate with anyone investigating whether Trump violated the law: he has made such sweeping claims of immunity to investigation that a federal judge recently described his arguments as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”

Let’s take these two arguments in turn: the argument that Trump may demand that the House impeachment inquiry be conducted in a certain way and the argument that Trump has broad authority to resist investigations.
Cipollone claims that the House’s impeachment inquiry should afford Trump certain rights typically associated with criminal trials, including “the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses” and “to have counsel present.” But this demand misunderstands the role of the House during impeachment.
As Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, the House stands in the role of “accusers” during the impeachment process while the Senate acts as “judges” over anyone impeached by the House. A House impeachment inquiry is not, in other words, analogous to a trial. It is more similar to a police investigation of someone suspected of committing a crime.

Even at a Senate trial, an impeached official may not demand the kind of due process rights that Trump seeks. A similar issue arose in Nixon v. United States (1992), a Supreme Court case involving disgraced federal Judge Walter Nixon, who claimed that his impeachment trial did not afford him due process because certain parts of that trial were delegated to a committee consisting of only a subset of the Senate.
As the Court explained, the Constitution gives the House the “sole” power to impeach and the Senate the “sole” power to try those impeachments. The Supreme Court concluded that courts have virtually no authority whatsoever to second-guess the process Congress uses during an impeachment.

The executive branch has a very limited ability to resist subpoenas emerging from an impeachment inquiry

While the courts may not micromanage the process used during impeachment, they often have an obligation to enforce subpoenas. That was the holding of United States v. Nixon (1974), an entirely different Nixon case involving then-President Richard Nixon. This was the pivotal Watergate case that required Nixon to release incriminating tapes, which eventually led to his resignation.
This Nixon case concluded that many of a president’s communications with his aides are shielded from investigators. “Human experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process,” the Court explained. To ensure that presidents receive honest advice from their advisers — even when that advice is unpopular or impolitic — courts should show “great deference” to a president’s assertion that internal White House communications should be kept secret.
This deference, though, is not absolute. Allowing the president to “withhold evidence that is demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial would cut deeply into the guarantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the courts,” the Supreme Court concluded, forcing President Nixon to turn over incriminating tapes that eventually led to his resignation.

A 1997 federal appeals court decision, In re: Sealed Case, offered a fuller explanation of executive privilege, defining it as coming in two different forms. The stronger form, known as the “presidential communications privilege,” applies to communications directly with the president, or communications “authored or solicited and received by those members of an immediate White House adviser’s staff who have broad and significant responsibility for investigating and formulating the advice to be given the President on the particular matter to which the communications relate.”

This privilege is what was at issue in the 1974 Nixon case. And Sealed Case described several limitations on it: Among other things, it is “limited to communications ‘in performance of [a President’s] responsibilities,’ ‘of his office,’ and made ‘in the process of shaping policies and making decisions.’” Sealed Case also suggests that congressional committees may breach the presidential communications privilege when it seeks information that is “demonstrably critical to the responsible fulfillment of the Committee’s functions.”

Meanwhile, a weaker privilege known as the “deliberative process privilege” permits “the government to withhold documents and other materials that would reveal ‘advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a process by which governmental decisions and policies are formulated.’” But this privilege is extraordinarily weak. Indeed, it “disappears altogether when there is any reason to believe government misconduct occurred.”

So House investigators have broad power to subpoena almost all executive branch communications so long as there is “reason to believe government misconduct occurred.” They have somewhat less power to seek communications involving Trump and his inner circle, but even these communications may be subpoenaed when they will reveal information that is “demonstrably critical” to the impeachment inquiry. And documents unrelated to Trump’s official duties — such as, say, his tax returns — are not subject to executive privilege at all.
The White House’s sweeping refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry simply has no basis in law.

What happens if the Supreme Court orders Trump to comply with the law and he says “no”?

If a court does order the administration to comply with congressional subpoenas, Trump’s first line of defense is the fact that Republican appointees control the Supreme Court. There’s no guarantee than any such order will be upheld by this Supreme Court, no matter how clearly existing caselaw says that it should.

But let’s assume the best-case scenario for impeachment investigators. Suppose that the courts move swiftly, that they soundly reject Trump’s defiance of congressional oversight, and that the Supreme Court orders Trump to end that defiance. What comes next if Trump refuses to comply with that order?

I asked Josh Chafetz, a Cornell law professor and author of Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, what legal options exist shy of impeachment. His response was pretty fatalistic. “At the point at which we’re talking about ignoring court orders,” Chafetz told me, “what does ‘legal options’ even mean any more?”

The remedy, if it came at all, would have to be political. If Trump were to defy both the House and the judiciary, Chafetz predicts that the president “would outrage a decent chunk of the public” and that Trump’s approval rating would crater. That “would have the effect of turning a bunch of GOP elites against him, which, in turn, might drive his approval still lower. I think at that point it ends with his ouster.”

But Chafetz adds that he’s not especially certain of this outcome and he “could very easily see it going other ways, too.”
Trump presides over a Republican Party that is both more united and more homogenous than the party Nixon presided over. Even if President Nixon wanted to defy the 1974 Nixon decision, it’s unlikely he could have gotten away with such a decision because much of his own party would have turned against him.

For one thing, political parties were far less “sorted” in 1974 than they are today. There were still conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans and these factions wielded considerable power within their party coalitions. After Nixon left office, for example, Republican President Gerald Ford picked the leader of his party’s liberal wing as vice president.

So lawmakers in 1974 were accustomed to working across party lines because that was often the only way to find enough ideological allies to get a bill through Congress. Today’s lawmakers are far less accustomed to forming such cross-partisan alliances.

Similarly, for reasons that Princeton political scientist Frances Lee explains, Nixon-era Republicans had a particular incentive to work with Democrats that Trump-era Republicans do not. For most of the 1970s, largely due to the fact that many Southern conservatives still identified as Democrats, the Democratic Party had an enormous advantage in the battle for control of Congress. Because Republicans expected to be in the minority, they had a strong incentive to make nice with Democrats because forming bipartisan alliances was the most reliable way for Republicans to wield power.

Lee’s thesis is that when “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” the parties tend to polarize. Why cooperate with your partisan rivals when you can undermine them and increase your own chances of gaining the majority in the process?
Republicans have a strong incentive to stick with Trump no matter how often Trump thumbs his nose at the law. Republicans don’t see Democrats as potential allies; they see them as bitter rivals trying to take something they want.

Many of the Founding Fathers, for what it’s worth, understood the risk of such a polarized system and hoped to avoid it. “There is nothing I dread So much, as a Division of the Republick into two great Parties,” future President John Adams wrote in 1780. A two-party system “is to be dreaded as the greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.”

Yet many of the men who designed the Constitution believed that they’d built a system that was immune to partisanship. The “well constructed Union” envisioned under that Constitution, future President James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, would have a “tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

It didn’t. As anyone familiar with the musical Hamilton can tell you, the nation’s leaders split into two political parties almost immediately after the Constitution was ratified.

The framers, in other words, built our government on the assumption that lawmakers could rally together during times of crisis, rather than dividing into teams and digging in for partisan advantage. Polarized political parties simply are not compatible with a system that requires two-thirds of the Senate to remove a president — at least, if you don’t want a system where the president is immune from impeachment.

That’s likely to leave the question of whether Trump will face consequences for lawless behavior to the voters — which is ultimately where it rests in any democracy. A well-designed constitution can mitigate the risk that a corrupt executive will hold onto power but it can’t prevent the voters from repeatedly electing such a leader.
As Chafetz warns, “no constitution on its own can prevent power holders from blowing through it if there is not sufficient political will to stop them.”

AGreatDipAtAFairPrice · 10 de Oct, 2019

He isn't stonewalling shit until Democrats sac up, vote for impeachment hearings and issue proper subpoenas, not the pussyboy "strongly worded letters" that Secretary of State Pompeo was right to tell them to turn sideways and stick up their twats.

Manwithn0n0men · 10 de Oct, 2019

Also the House's unconstitutional impeachment process is also a constitutional crisis

Coconut Gun · 10 de Oct, 2019

Maybe if we just keep saying there's an impeachment inquiry, that'll make one appear. Kind of like how if we just keep saying the Ukraine phone call was shocking, it will actually become shocking.

AGreatDipAtAFairPrice · 10 de Oct, 2019

"It is not a trial but akin to a police investigation."

Ciccilone's letter has a lot of stuff in it but the crux of the matter is President Trump doesn't want to talk to dirty cops and he's ordering his subordinates to not do it, either. President Trump doesn't want to talk to the cops, he can just tell them to suck a D and cite the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th amendments. Done.

After seeing what happened to Stone, Flynn, Corsi and others, as well as all the other numskulls in history who thought, "I have nothing to hide, so talking to the cops can only help me. It will exonerate me! It will be exculpatory! An innocent person WELCOMES investigation!" and all the other cop-sniffing and boot-looking BS, why would anybody want to talk to these rabid railroaders?

DON'T TALK TO COPS.

Ruin · 10 de Oct, 2019

I like how this is an open admission the left can't win unless their opponents literally roll over and die.

Manwithn0n0men · 10 de Oct, 2019

AGreatDipAtAFairPrice dijo:
DON'T TALK TO COPS.

If you have power use it

Dems don't want all this stuff investigated or brought to the public light....thats why we have a show trial

Ivan Shatov · 10 de Oct, 2019

Yeah. This is a Vox article, which means treat it like bullshit.

"Impeachment Inquiry" means hearing. It doesn't entitle Congress to anything beyond a normal hearing.

"Whistleblower" means accuser. The identity of the person is important to understand. We have Constitutional protections to confront accusers, which the Dems seem to be taking steps to deny.

What we're seeing is a Legislature run amok and a media intent on making the administration seem lawless. They are using words and comparisons with Nixon to dress up the truth. Democrats are insane.

From The Uncanny Valley · 10 de Oct, 2019

Since when did these chuckleshits care about the Constitution?

Maxliam · 10 de Oct, 2019

Uncanny Valley dijo:
Since when did these chuckleshits care about the Constitution?

When it suits them. They hate guns unless it's their bodyguards packing, they hate free speech unless it's their weirdo hippie protests, they don't like due process when it's a white guy.

A Cardboard Box · 10 de Oct, 2019

The great irony here is that the Democrats have outrage fatigued themselves into a corner. They've been using the I word for his entire presidency and blowing everything out of proportion so much that now, when he actually did something impeachable, nobody knows just how bad it is, because they are treating this the same way they treated going golfing at Mar a Lago or the grab em by the pussy thing.

If the allegations are accurate, if he really did pressure foreign officials for favors while dangling US aid packages as leverage, that is absolutely quid pro quo and is expressly illegal and unconstitutional and he needs to be impeached. That's a big if.

The other thing is that they're doing the exact same thing right now by claiming he's obstructing justice when he's not because there isn't actually an impeachment inquiry or subpoenas. He's not obstructing until they actually issue a subpoena and he tells them to get fucked. They need to not use the O word because right now they're saying "he's obstructing this is wrong" but if he actually does obstruct now what are they going to say? "Oh he's REALLY obstructing now! He was only kinda obstructing earlier!"

Rand /pol/ · 10 de Oct, 2019

Maxliam dijo:
They hate guns unless it's their bodyguards packing

There's an actual reason for cops, military, and bodyguards to have guns but there isn't any for dipshit hicks to have any other than that they might accidentally kill themselves.

A Cardboard Box · 10 de Oct, 2019

Rand /pol/ dijo:
There's an actual reason for cops, military, and bodyguards to have guns but there isn't any for dipshit hicks to have any other than that they might accidentally kill themselves.

Bill of RIGHTS not bill of NEEDS. Get the fuck out of here you commie fuck.

Tour of Italy · 10 de Oct, 2019

I’m personally not convinced the inquiry is legitimate until they pass a resolution. Even then, there’s a strong argument that without articles, the Whitehouse can tell them to fuck off.

Without a vote though, it’s not “the House” conducting an inquiry, it’s Pelosi, a few committees, and any Democrat too idiotic to see that this is going to blow up in their faces.

Sm0kINHaZefEEliNBlaZEd · 10 de Oct, 2019

Rand /pol/ dijo:
There's an actual reason for cops, military, and bodyguards to have guns but there isn't any for dipshit hicks to have any other than that they might accidentally kill themselves.

Yes, to protect the elites.

Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth · 10 de Oct, 2019

A Cardboard Box dijo:
The great irony here is that the Democrats have outrage fatigued themselves into a corner. They've been using the I word for his entire presidency and blowing everything out of proportion so much that now, when he actually did something impeachable, nobody knows just how bad it is, because they are treating this the same way they treated going golfing at Mar a Lago or the grab em by the pussy thing.

If the allegations are accurate, if he really did pressure foreign officials for favors while dangling US aid packages as leverage, that is absolutely quid pro quo and is expressly illegal and unconstitutional and he needs to be impeached. That's a big if.

The other thing is that they're doing the exact same thing right now by claiming he's obstructing justice when he's not because there isn't actually an impeachment inquiry or subpoenas. He's not obstructing until they actually issue a subpoena and he tells them to get fucked. They need to not use the O word because right now they're saying "he's obstructing this is wrong" but if he actually does obstruct now what are they going to say? "Oh he's REALLY obstructing now! He was only kinda obstructing earlier!"

No, no he didn't. Jesus fucking Christ.

*READ THE TRANSCRIPTS*

KingCoelacanth · 10 de Oct, 2019

Fox news poll show that 55% support impeachment and 51% support removal.
This whole ordeal is already a major victory for the Dems

Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth · 10 de Oct, 2019

KingCoelacanth dijo:
Fox news poll show that 55% support impeachment and 51% support removal.
This whole ordeal is already a major victory for the Dems

...but how?

US President Donald J. Trump Impeachment Megathread - Democrats commit mass political suicide

Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

RodgerDodger

Takayuki Yagami

Justice is Blind, and Autistic

Iwasamwillbe

Austro-Bohemian-Flemish-Cretan-Japanese Mischling

Trump’s resistance to the impeachment inquiry is a genuine constitutional crisis

AGreatDipAtAFairPrice

Manwithn0n0men

Coconut Gun

He's the gun member of the coconut crew

AGreatDipAtAFairPrice

Ruin

Mercenary Slut

Manwithn0n0men

Ivan Shatov

Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam

From The Uncanny Valley

when the bullet hits the bone

Maxliam

You all disgust me.

A Cardboard Box

Rand /pol/

A Cardboard Box

Tour of Italy

This season, we’re bringing more dishes you love.

Sm0kINHaZefEEliNBlaZEd

Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth

AI Pope of Entropic Declesiastics/Ver. U+1F0ED

KingCoelacanth

Click here to change your title

Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth

AI Pope of Entropic Declesiastics/Ver. U+1F0ED