The country needs prosecutorial public hearings before the House and impeachment on all of the president’s major abuses of power:
- For justice for all whom the prez has seriously harmed and for more people whom he is harming every day
- For the House of Representatives as an official body and for the Democrats as the opposition party to formally condemn all of the prez’s tyrannical crimes of office, and to not otherwise allow fiat rule to become acceptable and thus normalize it
- To convey to the public the overwhelming array of abuses and the ever-worsening danger to democracy and to the public
- For the House Democrats to take seriously that they actually do have a real chance at making conviction in the Senate happen, and to build the political pressure needed to accomplish it
Toward that end, activists with Indivisible San Francisco and Indivisible East Bay decided to show Congress how they want it done. They drafted several articles of impeachment from among the literal dozens of serious offenses. For some of the articles they held model hearings, taking on the roles of congresspeople, staff, and witnesses, and for others they presented the charges. If you watch just one video, make it the third one, the model hearing on the prez’s bigoted and racist abuses of power and derelictions of duty. It’s rather shocking to hear it all together as charges and evidence.
If you agree that we need to impeach comprehensively, please call your congressperson today about these examples and the other charges that are important to you, and also spread the word about this project.
If you’re inspired by these model hearing videos and are up for going the extra mile, make one of your own! The scripts are online for you to use, or you can use the format to make your own article and model hearing video, and share it online with the hashtag #ImpeachForThePeople. (It would make a great theater or school project.)
Each article on its own should be enough justification to remove the president from office. But for the House to not consider all of them would be for congresspeople to violate their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution in its entirety. It would make the incantation of “no one is above the law” to be a sick joke upon history. Think about what it means to not impeach over the prez purposefully trading his office for profit in a kaleidoscopic myriad of ways. Think of what it means to not impeach over the prez intentionally withholding aid to Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane Maria, thus leaving thousands Americans to suffer and hundreds to die. Still today the administration illegally withholds aid that Congress passed.
If the Senate acquits on the Ukraine extortion scandal, there has to be at least the credible possibility of further impeachment and removal, or else within the structure of our government there is nothing stopping the prez. He would have license to become an untrammeled fascist tyrant, and it would put the 2020 election at severe risk. We need more articles of impeachment on the table now.