Constitution 101 - Pop Quiz

If, as appears inevitable, Donald Trump goes to trial in the Senate for removal from office after impeachment, how many votes would be needed to deny him not only the Oval Office, but any office of trust or honor under the United States?

Question 2: assume that Mr. Trump is indeed removed from office.  Can he then be charged and tried for criminal conduct carried out while he was in office?

Full disclosure - the first item above is a trick question;  the answer is not  67 votes, or 2/3 of the Senate.

Constitution 101 - Impeaching a President

However much Donald Trump might believe that Article 2 of our Constitution gives him unlimited powers, he's wrong.  However much it might bite his keister to acknowledge that Congress is indeed a co-equal branch of government to "his" Article 2, he's wrong.  The Constitution gives Congress complete control over the Executive, at least as far as the bounds within which that Executive branch must operate.

Article 1 Section 2, Clause 5 states The House of Representatives  ... shall have the sole power of impeachment.  Article 1 Section 3 Clause 6 says The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.  ...  When the President ... is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside ... and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present

Sorry, Mr. Trump.

Constitution 101: Impeachment and Federalist 65

I'm a politics junkie, a progressive, and a lover of language. For all those reasons, I can imagine no better foundation for our government, and our society at large, than the Constitution and its most significant amendments. The Declaration of Independence states that the role of government is to secure unalienable rights. Trouble is, for the first few years of the United States, that laudable goal was never achieved. The Articles of Confederation, under which the nation functioned from 1777, through full ratification in 1781, till the adopting of the new Constitution in 1787, had no teeth. That is what brought about the Constitutional Convention. The new charter for our country was written in Philadelphia from May to September in 1787, as was the Bill of Rights, its first 10 Amendments. Both the core document and the Bill were fully ratified in 1789, based in part on the Federalist Papers , the latter work of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Today's post, and the rest of the group sharing the generic label Constitution 101, presents the quintessential role of the Federalist Papers  in structuring our government and society.  Alexander Hamilton anticipated, in Federalist 65, that: impeachment would divide the public at large into widely differing camps\ impeachment carries the danger that a decision would be based more on the strength of the parties than the guilt or innocence of the accused impeachment's being charged in the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate mimics the British  practice of impeaching in the House of Commons and trying in the House of Lords Come on in to the classroom for the rest of today's lecture:  impeachment as described in Federalist 65.

Karlan 1.5 Bazillion, Collins 0.371

In today's first round of impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee, Ranking Member Doug Collins (yes, that Collins) made it clear he intended to use the time-honored Republican tactic of  interrupting the proceedings at every opportunity and dismissing testimony as meaningless.

 But Mr. Co0llins hadn't reckoned with Professor Pamela Karlam ...  😄

History Repeats Itself

This past July, the Trump Administration withheld nearly a half-billion dollars (to be more precise, about $390 million) in aid, both military and more general, from Ukraine.  We've heard about the reasoning (if one can call it that) behind short-changing Ukraine   I have to wonder, though, how long it will be before we're told why military aid, to Lebanon, already appropriated by Congress, was withheld by the Trump Administration.

Today, the administration released $105 million of that aid.  This loosening of the purse strings was largely due to  criticism from legislators, as well as from current and former members of the U. S. Foreign Service.  The aid dispersed today had been held, unexplained, for months.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D - CT) traveled a few weeks ago to Lebanon, and said yesterday he could see no legitimate security rationale to withhold funding.

If You Can't Believe Fox News, Who Can You Believe?

In response to a question posed by The Economist magazine and the web site yougov.com, 53% of Republican respondents found Donald Trump a better President than Abraham Lincoln.

Click here to see this and all other results of the poll taken from Nov. 24 through Nov. 26 inclusive.  But be forewarned - the document as a whole is over 450 pages.

Doug Collins 2.0

On Saturday Nov. 30, Rep. Doug Collins (R - GA 9th), a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, insisted that further hearings into impeachment, scheduled to begin Wed. Dec. 4, should provide Republican members of the Judiciary Committee with the ability to call their own witnesses.  (One name mentioned in that context was Hunter Biden.)

Today (Sunday, Dec. 1) Rep. Collins outdid himself.  Again championing the idea that Republican members of Judiciary should have their own witness list, Collins took it a step further.  He insisted that such a list must include Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee and primary compiler of that Committee's report on the impeachment inquiry so far.  Collins justified this patently partisan choice of Schiff as witness by saying that Rep. Schiff had, on several occasions, tinkered with evidence.

I choose to call statements of that nature slander.  Here are other names for it.