"I failed to impeach a President John Tyler
and all I got was this losy oil painting."- John
Quincy Adams
Impeachment.
You know
the politicians are a class above us when they have their own special word for
indictment.
Not since Chris Huhne went to prison for lying to the police
in a statement have we seen a politician so obviously guilty as Donald Trump in
such a state of hopeless denial. It was
perfectly obvious to everyone else that Chris Huhne must have been guilty of
asking his wife to accept his penalty points for speeding as the records showed
clearly that he couldn’t have been where he told the police he was when the
incident occurred. Yet since he denied
his guilt vehemently one was forced to wonder was there actually some rational
explanation for his actions that was innocent.
Would, when the case came to trial, some clever Horace Rumpole be able
to get him off…? On the day of the trial
he suddenly decided to ignore Horace’s advice and pled guilty. Never plead guilty.
Mr Cohen said Mr Trump is guilty. Mr Cohen says Mr Cohen is guilty. Mr Cohen says that Mr Trump was not just a
co-conspirator but the genesis of the conspiracy. This isn’t even Watergate where Nixon
hamfistedly failed to cover up what his own bungling burglars had been up
to. This isn’t someone who has tried to extricate
themselves from a sticky situation and got stuck further in the quicksand of
their own duplicity. This is a man who
set out to bribe a sex worker during an election campaign and told Mr Cohen to
do it – if we are to believe Mr Cohen.
Is it still possible Trump could get off on a technicality…? Well, when it was just the recording …
…but now it’s the man he’s talking to in the recording
saying “Yes, he did.”
Of course Trump’s biggest card in this is that he cannot be
arrested – unlike Huhne, Archer, Aitken or any of the others with their the
simple swords of truth and trusty shields of fair play Trump has the consitition to protect him. And protect him it will ...even at the cost of a constitutional crisis.
Yes, apparently arresting the President would create for the
Americans a Constitutional crisis because it’s not felt that it would be a good
idea to put someone with a nuclear football inside a maximum security
prison. In their wisdom the founding
fathers decided that it would be a good idea to place the President (but not
the vice President) above the law. It
was almost inevitable then that someone would work out that if you broke the
laws about getting elected President it wouldn’t really matter because you
couldn’t be arrested once elected. If a sitting UK MP or PM is
arrested it doesn’t matter too much because we’ve got Queen Elizabeth II…
… to not be too dodgy.
If an MP goes to prison for more than a year they lose their seat
anyway. But thoughtfully while all
their civil servants have to undergo security clearance and even developed vetting
it is thought by somebody that applying these standards to MPs is taking it too
far.
So is Trump done for?
Yes. The only question remaining
is how many more people will he drag down with him. Even in the USA a self-proclaimed criminal can’t
stand for a second term…? Even if the
Democrats don’t have a majority in either house it’s surely going to go to a
vote… and that will be the beginning of the end. Trump will stop being a lame duck and become
a sitting duck…
And what then? Even
if he is finally arrested after he has left office he’ll be mid 70s …so it’s
unlikely he’ll serve more than 10 years before death lends a hand …
Of course there’s also the thorny question of how
unconstitutional arresting Trump is. One
problem is that as head of the executive he can just keep firing everyone who
investigates or arrests him. Are
investigators and police officers going to start going into I am Spartacus mode
with people being specially taken on to process Trump’s prosecution until they
are sacked then the next person takes over?
Perhaps some kind of revolving door can be arranged…?
It’s a constitutional crisis… the biggest problem in
Impeaching Trump is the two thirds majority needed in the Senate which mean that
it’s pretty damn hard to impeach a President.
After multiple attempts to impeach President John Tyler failed John
Quincy Adams suggested that the voting system should be changed back to a
simple democratic one of 50 per cent plus one … However, on the whole and after
some reflection the Senate felt that one could take democracy too far…
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