Robert Kuttner writes: There are already plenty of grounds to impeach Donald Trump. The really interesting question is when key Republicans will decide that he’s more of a liability than an asset.
If Trump keeps sucking up to Vladimir Putin, it could happen sooner than you think.
The first potential count is Trump’s war with the courts. The Supreme Court is likely to give expedited review to the order by the 9th Circuit upholding Judge James Robart’s order that tossed out Trump’s bans on immigrants or refugees from seven countries, even permanent US residents and others with valid green cards.
It’s encouraging that the agencies of government, such as the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, immediately deferred to the court order, not to a president who thinks he can govern by decree.
But suppose the Supreme Court finds against Trump? Will he try to defy the high court? That would be a first-class impeachable offense. Even Richard Nixon deferred to a Supreme Court order to turn over the Watergate tapes.
A second category of impeachable offense involves his mixing his personal profits with his official duties as president. That describes his bizarre romance with Vladimir Putin, who presides over a nation where Trump has extensive business interests, as well as Trump’s double standards in determining which Muslim nations were exempted from his executive order. [Continue reading…]
Weeks ago, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker published the key insight that undermines the impeachment idea: Trump’s policy plans are for the most part nothing more than what the Republicans have been pushing forever. With impeachment, you’re not cutting the head off the snake — it’s more like clipping a leaf from a tree.
Under the misleading banner of “I alone can fix it,” Trump (or more likely his ‘advisers’) has set up a cabinet apparatus in which the major agencies are headed by a team of people determined to destroy them, with the exception of Defense, where Mattis is but mad north-north-west. This metastasis would survive Trump’s removal, presumably. Furthermore, the bulk of planning for the war on society, involving the destruction of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, originates from Congress, which is led by poisonous figures operating at the level of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.
What would, we can hope, go down with Trump would be the Bannon regency. An immediate corollary, alas, is that Bannon — who has appointed himself to the NSC and is apparently trying to fill the government (and even the papacy, according to today’s NYT) with his people — will do everything he can to prevent this from happening. The one sure unifier in American politics is war, in whose virtues Bannon is a professed believer. Thus far, the Trumpistas have contented themselves with fantasy — the world is awash in terrorist attacks, suppressed by a traitorous media, run undoubtedly by ‘cosmopolitans’ — but as this fades, the shooting must begin.
The comments from the White House on the immigration court case are dangerous. If the essence of the original ruling [1] is upheld by the Supreme Court then it is our so-called President and his so-called staff who are shown to be incompetent.
[1] There is no doubt on my mind that the original order of the judge prompted the White House to rescind the Executive Order that some permanent residents of the USA lost their right of re-entry from abroad. If the only significant ruling by the Supreme Court is that the executive does not have the power to void the immigration status of whole groups of persons but only of individuals and even then only by due process in court that would be a major defeat for Bannon who was the author of the abominal Executive Order