The House Should Impeach Trump Now

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

13 May 17

tunning,” “a Constitutional crisis,” “the beginning of the unraveling of his presidency.” What else can we journalists come up with to avoid, as almost all of us are, reporting outright that President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey smashes down into the middle of Congress’s agenda the tabooable but nevertheless overriding issue of whether to impeach Trump for — just most recently — his abuse of his power by obstruction of justice in the FBI’s criminal investigation of his presidential campaign.

As one New York Times columnist responded at once, “The President of the United States is lying again.” Trump’s claim that he fired Comey because of the way the FBI chief handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email scandal is a lie and is shown so by numerous accounts from insiders now characterizing the president as day after day outraged at Comey over his and the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents and agencies to help him defeat Clinton to become our president.

The most obvious fact about the subject of impeaching Trump is that with the Republicans in control, the necessary investigations in the U.S. House that must precede an impeachment vote there cannot likely win a vote to undertake to conduct them. A valuable analysis of the impeachment topic in The New Yorker this month concluded commonsensically that the Democrats should wait until the 2018 election and, if they take the House back then, go for impeachment then.

The problem with that is the perilous present situation in the country and the world.

Trump has shifted the Supreme Court to a hard-right 5-4 majority for a generation and soon, if uninterrupted, will tilt many of the lower federal courts in the same far-right slant. Despite his thwarted ban-the-Muslim attempts, he is moving now to deport “illegal aliens” evidently by the millions just because they’re illegal. The presidential Cabinet of the self-promoted workers’ champion is a round-the-table of agents of the country’s gigantic corporate and financial institutions. Every other day Trump is ordering most of his secretaries of the government agencies to thwart or not enforce the purposes the agencies were created to advance. He is turning the American government against protecting the environment and combatting climate change.

From the Congress, he is actively seeking the abolition of Medicaid as a guaranteed entitlement and reducing its funds, the slashing of Medicare benefits, and the repeal of the taxes on the rich for Obama’s healthcare to offset the deficit chasm that will be caused if Congress passes Trump’s violent corporate tax-rate cut (from 35 to 15%!), channeling unprecedented trillions of dollars to enrich corporate and “pass-through” businesses, including his own.

In warmaking, Trump, personally armed with our nation’s nuclear weapons, is probably the most dangerous person on earth. He alone can decide at any moment to order the detonation of our Hbomb or B61-12 or any other nuclear weapons on any nation or target. He has demonstrated unmistakably, by his impulsive immediate dispatch of 59 Tomahawk missiles to explode in Syria when he was moved by TV photos of children squirming and dying from chemical weapons attacks there, that in a rage, on impulse, he may attack nations we are not at war with, using tools he selects out of the unmatched U.S. arsenal that is now at his command. Yet evidently he has turned over to his generals in the field and admirals at sea a serious portion of his constitutional duties as Commander in Chief in “areas of hostilities,” decisions on war zones, attacks, what huge weapons to use, U.S. troop levels.

Given his revengeful and emotional temperament on display for all to see across the past few years, there is no telling how stable and careful Trump will be if the United States causes or is caught in a military emergency with another country or countries.

Trump and his secretaries of Defense and State have already specifically threatened nuclear-weaponed North Korea with “pre-emptive strikes”; that is, that we may bomb or otherwise attack them although the U.S. has not been attacked. Implicitly, in the closely relevant contexts, Trump and his people are implying specifically that we may militarily attack the North Koreans first if they do not agree to consider our insistence that they totally abandon their nuclear weapons and programs. North Korea has responded with verbal violence, threatening that before we make our pre-emptive strike, they can make theirs against, say, the 25 million people in Seoul 35 miles across the DMZ from them or Japan across the water. If we attack North Korea first, they might still retaliate against those nearby targets, where we have tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

Our Constitution specifies that only Congress can declare war, but I have not once heard or seen the authoritarian Trump allude to that law of our land, even as an afterthought. If the members of Congress continue their politically calculating duck-away from their constitutional duty since the Korean War, well, here we are with Donald Trump as our Commander in Chief.

Other than the North Koreans, the people of South Korea have more directly at stake in this than any others. A pro-peace liberal who has just been elected the new president of South Korea intends to talk with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un and to re-open economic cooperation. This is in diametrical contrast to Trump’s explicit message to Kim that he’d better do what we tell him to. The North Koreans argue that without nuclear weapons they are done for. The evident meaning of what Trump is saying to Kim on behalf of the United States is, if you get close to having nuclear-armed missiles that can reach the United States, it’s war. Trump has also specifically stated that a U.S.-North Korean war could kill “tens of millions.”

Yes, the Democrats could wait until the November after next, 19 months from now, but considering what risks can happen in the next year and a half here and anywhere, they should demand and compel now a test record vote among the House members for them to conduct the broad investigation and consideration of President Trump that is preliminary to a vote in the same House on whether to impeach him.

On the record, vote yes, vote no, or abstain!

To impeach Trump is not to eject him from the White House. An impeachment is similar to an indictment. The “grand jury” that decides on an impeachment is the U.S. House. The “jury” is the U.S. Senate. If the House decides to impeach, the news is sent over to the Senate, which then decides, by debating and voting, that he or she is guilty as charged or not. Only if the Senate’s verdict on Trump is “guilty” would he have to leave the White House and go back to the former life he so enjoyed and live again at Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, or anywhere else.

The House’s vote on whether to take its preliminary steps to impeach might be yes, and the process could begin. To think this through together, though, let’s guess that the motion to investigate concerning whether to impeach fails. No action now.

Well, as I see it, those trying now to impeach Trump would have done their duty to their grandchildren and the country, and two Novembers from now the voting people of the United States would have an absolutely clear record vote, impeach Trump or don’t, on which to ground their own votes on the election or re-election of all the 435 House members, and, if it had come to a Senate vote, a third of the 100 U.S. senators. If the Democrats took back the House in 2018, then, if a second attempt was still needed, the pro-impeachment members would have the votes to move against Trump just as the House moved against Nixon in 1973.

Now this all depends mainly on how many House Republicans by now have realized inside themselves that what’s at stake here is not only their and their party’s honor and fate, but, much more, the integrity of American democracy and the peace of the world. Since the country and the human race are really “on the table,” the House should vote to decide now on the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Ronnie Dugger, working now in Texas on a book about nuclear weapons ethics, received the George Polk career award in journalism in 2012. Founding editor of The Texas Observer, he is the author of presidential biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, other books on Hiroshima and universities, and numerous articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other publications. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .