REpublicans don't care about the legitimate stuff either.
Thus the reason I didn't vote for their guy either.
So then what happens? Just allow his nonsense to become de rigor? Ensure that that is the new reality for the body politick in the US? OR what if Republicans just insisted this ridiculous behaviour stopped?
We wait until 2028 and hope our options are better. Just like we've done for virtually every other president that people haven't liked.
I suppose they could try the impeachment route (again), but that whole process has been somewhat cheapened over the past few decades and nobody takes it seriously anymore. -- courtesy of partisan hacks who like to call for impeachment for everything under the sun just to get rid of a political opponent they dislike.
I suspect (and this is just a hunch), had they not trotted out the first flimsy impeachment attempt, there's a chance the second one may have stuck.
Not sure how much coverage it got north of the border, but there was that organization called "Impeach Day One" that formed in late 2015. Their website had a big countdown clock until is swearing in. And the moment the clock hit zero, everyone was urging their reps to file articles of impeachment... literally the minute after his swearing in (before he had time to even do anything one way or the other)
And a few partisan types in the Senate tried to preemptively lay the groundwork to have a reason to impeach.
In December 2016, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Chris Coons, Ben Cardin, and Jeff Merkley introduced a bill that would require the president of the United States to divest any assets that could raise a conflict of interest, including a statement that failure to divest such assets would constitute high crimes and misdemeanors "under the impeachment clause of the U.S. Constitution".[3] Vanity Fair characterized this as a preemptive effort to lay the groundwork for a future impeachment argument.
When stuff like that goes on, it puts people between a rock and a hard place in terms of entertaining removal from office.
Like I mentioned before, it's a matter of incentive structures.
"We're going to add a new rule that no other president has had to abide by, and make failure to abide by it grounds for removal, and it'll go into effect a month after the guy we don't like got elected, and a month before his swearing in"
So if you want my honest opinion, has Trump done anything that could've warranted impeachment/removal in my viewpoint? Yes
But I don't want to incentivize this "buckshot, throw everything at the wall till something sticks, change the rules a few days before so we have a reason" approach, if we allow that to work, they'll just do that every time.
If it were up to some of the more obnoxious - almost to the comedic point of acting like they're in an exaggerated SNL sketch - house reps (like Al Green, Maxine Waters, and Rosa DeLauro), they would've tried to impeach him for that time he blew his nose into a cloth napkin at a restaurant and didn't wash his hands back in 1994.
If I were a Senator, and a person from the other team wins in November, and we know that he his family owns farms. And in December, me and my Senate buddies collude on a bill that said "A president and immediate family members have to sell off any agricultural holdings, because it could be a conflict of interest since they control the USDA, failing to do so is impeachable"
People would rightfully see that as a sour grapes "You're just looking for a reason to impeach them" move.
My personal position would be, I'd rather put up with 2.5 more years of a sub-par president, than reinforce the idea people can just throw a dozen sham calls for impeachment attempts up against the wall, and eventually succeed.
I've often pondered an idea that I think would good. Our system of government sets all kinds of limits on various procedural processes. There should be one for impeachment attempts. You get 1 per president.
I feel that would bring some seriousness back into procedure, and make people think harder before trying it. And that limit would reinforce the idea of "You only get one shot at this, so you better make sure you've got the goods, we don't get a mulligan"
That would have inspired some self-policing. When someone brings up a stupid impeachment idea, the more seasoned members would say "are you crazy, that's stupid, we're not going to waste it on that"
