An hour ago, the Untied States Government accepted a guilty plea from one Michael Cohen in which he said he paid a woman “at the direction of the candidate [Donald J. Trump]…for the purpose of influencing the [2016 US Presidential ] election.” So the President of the United States has, in open Federal court, been implicated in the violation of campaign finance laws (the amount paid was in excess of the individual contribution limit).
We are repeatedly told that the President, while in office, cannot be charged with a crime. That’s not explicit in the Constitution, but rather an opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. First in 1973 with President Richard M. Nixon, and then again in 2000 with President Bill Clinton, the OLC determined that the indictment or prosecution of a sitting president “would be unconstitutional because it would impermissibly interfere with the President’s ability to carry out his constitutionally assigned functions.”
I lived through two years of Watergate, and another two years of Clintonian embarrassment, and learned that impeachment is a political, not a legal process. I also learned that trying to predict what could or should happen when the President runs afoul of the law is fruitless. In the end, we really are a democracy, and the scores of millions of voters in this country, as reflected in their elected representatives at all levels of government, are where the ultimate power resides. Not in any strict “one-person, one-vote” sense, though (Gore v. Bush, 2000, disabused us of that notion). So I’m not going to reflect on where this all might go, who’s right, or who’s wrong, because “truth” is not at issue. Power is.
So I will simply state what *I* want to see happen. I want the House of Representatives election this fall to result in a clear Democratic majority, and hopefully in the Senate as well. Then, one or both houses of Congress should spend their energy investigating all aspects of the administration, the whole sordid mess. There is no one, clear problem, as existed under during the Nixon and Clinton impeachments. We don’t have just a simple burglary of the opposition party headquarters (and subsequent cover-up), nor is it simply about sex in the oval office and dissimulation about that.
Price, Pruitt, Flynn, Cohen, Manafort … the list of already ousted/disgraced leaders and hangers-on is long. Even worse are the obvious cozy relationships between remaining administration leaders and the industries they purport to protect the people from. All that, as well as the republican 2016 presidential campaign’s relationship with Russia, should be subject to committee hearings and on-going investigations, crippling the leadership and underlining the sad truth about the President and his team as they go about bumbling towards autocracy.
If the people rise up during that and say, “Enough is enough; impeach the bastard, already”, then Congress, which in the end is a collection of people who in large measure want to keep their jobs and are keenly tuned into popular opinion, will act. But if the President continues to enjoy the unqualified support of 40% of voters, and a big majority within those states with Republican Senators, then keep the fires burning, and bounce him out in 2020. The last thing we want is a sympathetic Pence holding the office for re-election.