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Take Five: (from left) Presidents Nixon, Ford, Clinton, Obama and Trump
Norman Solomon
What about ‘unimpeachable’ offences?
I
mpeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offences?” The question is the flipside of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offence? The only honest answer is that an
impeachable offence is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” By narrowly defining which offences are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which aren’t. So, when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article in January, the actions were much
too late and much too little. On Feb. 6, 2017, less than three weeks into Trump’s term, I wrote in The Hill newspaper: “From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the US Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway”. I pointed out that “the president continues to violate ColdType | March 2021 | www.coldtype.net
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