Tajul Islam
Democrats are desperately looking for impeaching President Donald Trump following the November 2018 midterm polls. Sensing a positive vibe, Iran and some other diehard enemies of the United States of America are putting large sum of money behind anti-Trump campaign with the hope of seeing the pro-American president removed from the office. Millions of dollars are being spent in the election campaign as well as campaign against President Trump.
In a pro-Democrat website named Impeach Donald Trump Now a number of people have gathered there inspiring voters with Obama-patterned fake information with the lone goal of putting the President Trump as well as American constitution into trouble. The website in a page titled – ‘The Case of impeachment’ says, “From the moment he took office, President Trump’s refusal to divest from his business interests has placed him in direct violation of the US Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause and Domestic Emoluments Clause. Since then, his corruption and abuse of power have only increased. The President must be held accountable under the law, through the impeachment process, for these serious violations and for this unprecedented level of corruption of the Oval Office.
Free Speech For People and RootsAction call upon Congress to open an investigation to determine whether there are sufficient grounds to impeach President Trump, including:
obstruction of justice;
violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and Domestic Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution;
conspiring with others to: (a) commit crimes against the United States involving the solicitation and intended receipt by the Donald J. Trump campaign of things of value from a foreign government and other foreign nationals; and (b) conceal those violations;
advocating illegal violence, giving aid and comfort to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and undermining constitutional protections of equal protection under the law;
abusing the pardon power;
recklessly threatening nuclear war against foreign nations, undermining and subverting the essential diplomatic functions and authority of federal agencies, including the United States Department of State, and engaging in other conduct that grossly and wantonly endangers the peace and security of the United States, its people and people of other nations, by heightening the risk of hostilities involving weapons of mass destruction, with reckless disregard for the risk of death and grievous bodily harm;
directing or endeavoring to direct law enforcement, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to investigate and prosecute political adversaries and others, for improper purposes not justified by any lawful function of his office, thereby eroding the rule of law, undermining the independence of law enforcement from politics, and compromising the constitutional right to due process of law;
undermining the freedom of the press; and
cruelly and unconstitutionally imprisoning children and their families.
On February 16, 2017, Free Speech For People and RootsAction delivered a petition with over 860,000 signatures to Congress calling on the House of Representatives to initiate an impeachment investigation into President Trump’s corrupt business dealings, including violations of the U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, and other federal law. More than 1.3 million people, and an increasing number of cities and towns, have joined the campaign.”
This group has total 12 people in the legal and advisory board – most of whom are academicians.
The anti-Trump media also are running wild campaign against the president and are instigating the voters in electing more Democrats in the House and Senate to ‘ensure the impeachment’. They are showing the impeachment as ‘an essential task’ for the American people.
But TIME magazine sees the impeachment as difficult. In an article Katie Reilly wrote: “Among his critics, talk of impeachment began long before President Donald Trump even took office.
But questions about impeachment loomed larger after Trump’s former campaign manager and longtime personal lawyer were found guilty of financial crimes in separate federal courtrooms on Tuesday. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, pleaded guilty to eight felonies and testified under oath that he had paid two women to keep quiet about alleged affairs with Trump “at the direction of a candidate for federal office.”
“…While some Democrats have been raising questions about impeachment for months, party leaders have approached the subject with caution. On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the Associated Press that impeaching Trump was still “not a priority” for Democrats, despite Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea. “Impeachment has to spring from something else,” she said.”
“…But the process of impeaching an American president, much less removing them from office, is quite challenging, as can be seen from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the idle chatter of impeaching Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.”
“…Bush and Obama both faced idle impeachment threats that never amounted to anything. People who now believe there’s a serious case for impeaching Trump will have to overcome the reputation established by those who raise the specter of impeachment merely to demonstrate political opposition.
“That makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, to figure out what’s really the substantive conduct and the substantive problem,” Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, previously told TIME. “We can’t rely on political rhetoric to guide us because political rhetoric is so overheated.””
Ms.Reilly wrote, The Constitution states that a president can be impeached if convicted of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Those looking to impeach Trump would need to show he has done something that falls into one of those categories.”
“…Arguments for impeachment have thus far been resting on potentially flimsy claims. “The critical thing that those congressmen will have to show is that he’s done something that will qualify as treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Gerhardt previously told TIME. “That’s the threshold.””
“…Only two presidents in U.S. history have been impeached: Clinton in 1998 on charges of lying under oath to a federal grand jury, and Andrew Johnson in 1868 on charges of violating the Tenure of Office Act by firing the Secretary of War. Both Clinton and Johnson were Democrats who faced a Republican-controlled Congress, and both were still acquitted in the Senate because opponents failed to gather enough votes in the upper chamber. (Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.)”
“…But a poll released in April suggested that promising to pursue impeachment could backfire on congressional candidates. The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 47% of people said they would “definitely vote against” a candidate for Congress who wants to move to impeach Trump. Fewer respondents (42%) said they would “definitely vote for” a candidate who made that pledge.”
“…During Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, public opinion of Republicans fell, while Democrats and Clinton experienced a surge. When asked whether they wanted Clinton or the GOP “to have more influence over the nation,” Americans were evenly split between the two in September 1998, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. But by the time Clinton was impeached in December of that year, the gap had widened significantly. While 60% said they wanted Clinton to have more influence, just 31% said the same for the GOP.”
Reports of impeachment and replacing an incumbent president should remind us that it important to step back, see the wood from the trees.
We are in very dangerous times. All the evidence points towards nuclear war. The pattern of history is clear. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every conflict throughout history – no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might change, but not power.
Interest cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin, nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our principles, because that is what serves our interest. It is power, not any of the above concepts, that is the cause of war.
It is the one thing we will destroy ourselves for, as well as everyone else. When core interests are threatened and existential threat looms nations go to war. There can be no compromise on these. As a result every civilization/nation eventually gets the war it is trying to avoid: utter defeat. This applies as much today as any other time in history. Deterrence doctrine, made for the 20th century Cold War for which it arguably worked, is irrelevant in the 21st and will ultimately fail us. Deterrence can no longer prevent the scenarios where Mutual Assured Destruction will be resorted to. We will soon face the scenario that (unlike the Cuban missile crisis) one protagonist will not be able to step back from the brink, blindly stumbling into a situation they cannot de-escalate. All that is left is Deterrence’s fall-back position – annihilation.
Leaders and decision-makers delude themselves, thinking they can avoid their fate – they can’t. If survival is threatened, there is no alternative to war, however destructive.