Impeachment is not about punishing Trump. It is about safeguarding American democracy and protecting our Constitutional order.
Of course President Trump should be impeached and convicted. He incited a mob to intimidate Congress and the Vice President to steal the election based on baldfaced lies that he knowingly propagated. As a result, five people are dead, including two Capitol police officers.
As former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie put it, if this isn’t an impeachable offense, then nothing is.
The separation of powers within the federal government was one of the principal objectives of the American Founding Fathers when they drafted the Constitution.
By inciting a violent attack on the legislative branch of government, President Trump attacked one of the pillars of our Constitutional order. He must be held accountable for that attack. Impeachment and conviction are the only remedies available to Congress to ensure that justice is done.
This has nothing to do with punishment or revenge. Instead, it has everything to do with preventing a future president from trying to emulate Trump by launching a similar attack against the legislative branch of government.
Congress must lay down a clear marker now that such behavior will not be tolerated; and that there will be grave consequences for any president who even flirts with this idea.
And legalistic defenses of Trump won’t wash. The Founding Fathers deliberately made impeachment a legislative and not judicial prerogative. So whether Trump’s abhorrent behavior meets the strict legal definition of incitement is utterly irrelevant.
What matters is what Congress thinks and knows, not what a court of law might decide. And what Congress thinks and knows—what all of us think and know—is the the president blatantly egged on a mob to storm the Capitol.
Now, did the president know that the mob would turn violent? Maybe; maybe not. Who knows?
Again, that doesn’t matter. What we do know is that violence was a foreseeable consequence of Trump’s rhetoric and behavior; and that a responsible leader never would have behaved as Trump behaved.
As the New York Times reports:
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, just one of several of his tweets promoting the day. “Be there, will be wild!”
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told the mob Jan. 6.
You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong… Our country has been under siege for a long time…
We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved…
Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …
You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen…
Yes, Trump made a passing reference to marching “peacefully,” but that reference was obscured by his obsession with being “strong,” “fighting like hell,” and “stopping the steal.”
More ominously, as the Times reports, “Trump insinuated that Republican officials, including Pence, would endanger themselves by accepting Biden’s win.”
The mob heard Trump, loudly and clearly; it understood its marching orders; and it acted accordingly.
For these reasons, impeachment is completely warranted and necessary. It is necessary not to punish Trump, but to safeguard American democracy for the next 250 years.
Let every tyrant and demagogue know that, in the United States of America, incitements to violent attacks on the legislative branch of government and Constitutional order will not be tolerated.
Patriots, both left and right, Democrats and Republicans, should see this. Let us hope and pray that, in bipartisan fashion, they do the right thing and vote accordingly. America is watching. So, too, is the world.
Feature photo credit: ABC News.