Impeachment and what comes next.

As you may be aware, Donald Trump has become the third president to be impeached, following in the steps of Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, Nixon never actually got impeached as he resigned when the outcome became certain.

This does not mean Mike Pence is suddenly president mind you, for those who aren't on on he details, the process of impeachment is a lot like that of a grand jury sending a case to trial, in this case congress is that grand jury, they reviewed evidence and spoke to witnesses and decided that there is enough of a case that a trial is required, the next step is to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate, and events from there would proceed like a court case with agents for both the prosecution and the defense, as well as witnesses giving testimony under oath. IF the Senate decides the president is guilty they can then remove him from office and with an additional vote, prevent him from ever holding office again. However he then may be tried in civil or criminal courts for those charges, if applicable.

I say if applicable because the grounds for impeachment aren't necessarily criminal, just as any criminal act isn't necessarily grounds for impeachment, this is important because abuses of power aren't always a crime under US law, one thing Trump's defenders use is regarding accusations of bribery, now bribery is not one of the charges Trump was impeached under but they don't care, they argue that since no "quid pro quo" actually happened in the case of Ukraine, no charges of bribery can be filed because no crime was committed. This is wrong on a number of levels, first, the attempt at bribery is the crime, not the success of the bribery, second, even if bribery wasn't a crime Congress could decide that it was grounds for impeachment anyway, which is essentially what they did by charging him with abuse of power.

One can make the argument that bribery could have specifically been listed and it would have been a good one, but the judiciary committee apparently decided to keep the charges as lean and easy to understand as possible, I guess.

What happens next you ask? Well the smart money is on essentially nothing, there is virtually no chance of a 2/3rds majority in the Senate voting to convict Trump, although it will be interesting seeing if anyone defects or simply votes present on it. That of course assumes the matter even comes to the Senate floor of course, currently the articles are still in the hands of the House, and Nancy Pelosi in her office as Speaker has fairly broad discretion over when and if to send the articles to the Senate. She has been reluctant to push the impeachment process already and was basically forced into it due to the reaction of the Ukraine whistleblower and the transcripts that followed.

My guess is she is concerned that impeachment is a damaging issue that will lose "moderate" dems in the upcoming election, the fact that it is DOA in the Senate also makes it a tough PR move to back a measure everyone knows is going to lose handily. But the moderate democrats have been cowards for decades so fuck em.

In the end I think the Senate will get to it, but if it will ever come up for vote is another matter, Mitch McConnell has already said outright that he will not be following his constitutional duties on the issue, and I am unsure how much power he has to just hold up proceedings entirely, any trial that actually happens will be the most obvious sham the world has ever seen, and the vote will likely split precisely on party lines, though I have heard that as many as six Republicans might break ranks.

In the end though, odds are pretty solid that we'll still have this horrible man in office and have to vote him out next year, fuck me I just realized the election is in less than eleven months. Will impeachment matter then?

That's a solid maybe, right now polls are mixed to unfavorable towards the Dems on the issue. But I can't say I trust them at this point. I think that we might see something this coming year a lot like we saw in 2016 but from the opposite direction. back then we saw Democrats surge to leads in many battleground states, but then fall behind as more Republican voters than anyone suspected turned up in key counties. If the Millenials and younger turn out in any reasonable numbers than we may see something like that happen this coming year, and I think motivation will be pretty high this time around.

Conversely I don't know how high GOP motivation will be. Lots of people out of red counties have not seen any appreciable increase in their station during the last four years and while I have read all the stories of people who say they will vote Trump anyway despite all that, I think the odds are good that many are going to just stay home. Plus there is a bit of a decline in his support from the evangelical side of things, not that I think the evangelicals have suddenly become sane or anything, but I think it is getting harder even for them to ignore the fact that he literally never says anything even remotely in line with biblical teaching, even the shitty version they preach.

As usual it depends on my generation and younger mostly, but all things considered we have a good chance in the coming fall. Even if Biden gets the nomination. I'm rooting for Warren myself but let's be honest here, the casual political observer of my generation thinks pretty fondly of "Diamond" Joe Biden and that might be enough to carry things. It's not perfect by any means, but it might be all we have and the consequences are pretty dire.