[RANT]The impeachment will get nowhere, it will never make it out of the House.
Here is why…
1. 435 Representatives are in the House, of those 235 are Democrats and the Constitution states that you only need a simple majority to vote for an Articles of Impeachment.
a) When the committee calls for Trump’s people to testify they are going to decline to testify. That in itself is obstruction, the Democrats will file the courts to force them to testify and it will slowly wind its way through the court system. From the Republicans you will hear… crickets.
b) The House hearings will be stalled because “all the president’s men” will ignore the subpoenas and the hearing will get bogged down in court. The House will hold them in Contempt of Congress and submit the case to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Do you think that the Attorney General Barr will proceed with the court case?
c) Only 218 representatives, a simple majority must vote for the Articles of Impeachment.
2. If by any chance it does make it out of the House the Articles of Impeachment will then be tried in the Senate and in order to convict the president they will need 66 votes in favor of impeachment. The Democrats have 45 seats in the Senate and 2 independents, so the Democrats will need to get 19 Republicans to vote for impeachment.
a) The Constitution gives the Senate authority to hold the impeachment trail and the Supreme Court's chief justice presides over the Senate trial. However Sen. McConnell can keep it from seeing the light of day, there is nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to hold the trial.
So my prediction it will not happen.
But that does not to mean that the impeachment hearings are wrong, I just mean that I don’t think they will lead to the impeachment of the president.
I think that the Democrats will need to petition the Supreme Court to hear the cases right away when witnesses refuse to testify. I think that the Democrats need to focus on the economy and how he handles international diplomacy and trade. They should keep the hearings on the back burner otherwise the public will get burned out over the impeachment news.
I hope that I am wrong.
[/RANT]
Update 5:45 PM
When I wrote this this morning I didn’t realize that Trump would release such a damning transcript of his conversations with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
The Washington Post had this to say about the release of the transcript.
At least Richard Nixon had the good sense to resist releasing the “smoking gun” tape until finally forced to do so by the Supreme Court. That is because Nixon, the worst criminal to occupy the Oval Office until now, at least had a modicum of moral sense and self-awareness. He knew what he had said was wrong — he was heard plotting to use the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation of Watergate — and he realized that the tape’s release would be devastating to him.So maybe he will get 19 Republicans to vote for impeachment.
President Trump, by contrast, is so clueless — so lacking in even the most basic sense of right and wrong — that he could actually tweet this morning: “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President? They should, a perfect call — got them by surprise!” Suffice it to say, there were no apologies after the release of the Memorandum of Telephone Conversation (TelCon) between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. This isn’t a verbatim transcript, and it’s always possible that it was doctored in some way, but what is revealed in its five pages is deeply damaging to Trump.
“The United States has been very very good to Ukraine,” Trump tells Zelensky with an undertone of menace. “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very.good to Ukraine.” Eager to placate Trump, Zelensky thanks him “for your great support in the area of defense.” “We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.” (The Javelin is an antitank missile.)
The very next words out of Trump’s mouth are: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” Quid, meet quo. Trump is explicitly tying U.S. military aid to Ukraine to Ukraine’s willingness “to do us a favor.” He then makes clear that the “us” he is referring to is not the United States of America. It is the Trump campaign.
Now the balls in the Republican court, will they develop a backbone or will the kowtow down to the Republican Party and Senate Majority Leader McConnell?
However, many people still doesn’t support impeachment in a poll before the bombshell transcript.
Poll: No increased voter appetite for impeachmentAnd then in the Israel National News
Politico
By Steven Shepard
September 25, 2019
House Democrats still have a long way to go to get voters behind an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.
While even some of the caucus' most vulnerable members spent this past weekend inching closer to supporting impeachment, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll — conducted before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement on Tuesday that Democrats will pursue an impeachment inquiry — found that a plurality of registered voters still opposed impeachment, with little sign of movement toward supporting such steps.
In the poll — conducted Friday through Sunday, as stories circled about Trump allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democratic candidates hoping to oust him — 36 percent of respondents said they believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, the President’s job approval rating rose to 45.3% on average, the highest level since February 5th, when his job approval rating was 45.7%. Trump’s current job approval rating is just shy of his all-time recorded high of 46% on February 4th.Will McConnell stand pat and refuse to hold the impeachment trial? Only time will tell.
Trump’s net job approval rating remains underwater, however, with 52.1% of Americans disapproving of his performance as president according to an average of recent polls. That’s far above the lowest disapproval rating of his presidency, 44.2%, which was recorded nine days after Trump’s January 20th 2017 inauguration.
References:
Can the Senate Decline to Try an Impeachment Case?
What is impeachment and how does it work?
Update October 24th
There is an opinion article in the Washington Post today by Paul Waldman …
Surprise: Democrats are actually mounting an effective impeachment inquiry
If there’s one thing everyone in the political world agrees on, it’s that Democrats are a bunch of screw-ups who can’t get anything right. The impeachment process was supposed to be just one more example: They were fools for not starting it sooner, then they were dumb for starting it at all, then everything about it was supposed to be disastrous.
But now? From both a substantive and political perspective, the impeachment inquiry is going about as well as you could hope. Democrats are, in fact, getting this right.
That’s not to say everything’s been perfect. For instance, the leadership chose to focus on the Ukraine scandal and not include the many other impeachable acts Trump has committed as part of the inquiry. There’s a reasonable case you could make for either approach, but there are certainly plenty of high crimes and misdemeanors just around Ukraine.
[…]
This will then lead almost inevitably to a vote on impeach. The president is unlikely to be convicted in the Senate, which would require 20 Republican senators voting to remove him, but by then Democrats will have done all they could to gather information, display his wrongdoing for the public to see and understand, and impose what accountability they can.
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