Lawrence O’Donnell’s Intro on Monday:
Today, the president of the United States committed a crime in public, on Twitter, a federal crime, an impeachable high crime. The question now is not whether the president is a criminal or whether the president is impeachable.
The question now is, has America lost its mind? Has America lost its legal mind? Have Donald Trump and Trumpism and fanatical Trump voters so unbalanced the United States of America that the law does no longer apply to the president of the United States?
Lawrence believes it is blindingly obvious Trump has committed impeachable crimes, and he is frustrated the media and an overwhelmingly majority of Americans haven’t taken out their torches and pitchforks and surrounded the White House and Congress.
That’s why I watched Tuesday’s show with great interest because Lawrence had on the one person in the United States most able to do something about this in less than a month’s time — Representative Jerry Nadler, the incoming Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Jerry is fantastic: an extremely experienced, smart, very progressive and courageous Congressman. For example, he voted for the Iran deal knowing the extreme beating he would get from the anti-Iran deal activists in his district.
When Lawrence asked him about impeachment, Nadler articulated a three-part test:
Number one, do you believe that you have real solid evidence the president is committing impeachable offenses?
Number two, are those offenses of such gravity putting the country through an impeachment process?
And number three, because you don’t want to tear the country apart – you don’t want half the country the next 30 years, we won the election, you stole it from us. Do you think that the evidence that you have is so sufficiently clear and sufficiently convincing of deeds so clearly impeachable and necessary to impeach, that once you have laid it out, that you believe that once you have laid all that evidence out, an appreciable fraction of the opposition vote base will say they had to do this.
Rep. Nadler said he believed there were some non-hardcore Trump supporters who might be swayed by enough evidence.
Later, he made two possibly conflicting statements about the Senate’s role. Initially, he said:
First of all, simple arithmetic. You can’t remove the president without two-thirds vote in the Senate which means if you`re going to complete the process, you have to get some Republican votes.
But when pressed by O’Donnell, the Congressman said the test for impeachment in the House would not be whether the House believed the the Senate would convict.
Finally, Rep. Nadler said he believed Mueller was bound by the Justice Dept. memos precluding indictment of the President (though he disagreed with them, but noted that the President could be indicted when he leaves office. But that raises statute of limitations issues, so he planned to introduce a bill that would suspend the time period for a prosecution during the period the President was in office. (e.g., if there was a 3 year statute of limitations for obstruction and it expired in 2020, the time period would begin when the President leaves office in 2021, possibly another three years.)
Jerry is a very savvy, smart legislator, but I have some questions, primarily about No. 3:
For No. 3, Jerry is saying even if a President has committed impeachable acts of great gravity, the House should not impeach him unless some fraction of Republicans support it.
1. Under this test, even if Trump did shoot someone on proverbial Fifth Avenue, he could not be impeached without some Republican support. What if that support wasn’t there? Does he get away with murder?
2. More likely, there will likely be serious charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, maybe parts of the espionage act, obstruction of justice, etc. Will an “appreciable number” of Republicans support impeachment in that scenario? I’m not so sure.
3. Is it worth it to impeach the President if there’s no possibility of a 2/3 vote in the Senate? Jerry seemed a bit equivocal. My view: The House has an absolute obligation to impeach no matter what the Senate prospects are. If they don’t, no branch of government is repudiating the criminal acts of a President.
4. Won’t a Senate trial be valuable, even if the vote falls short? Yes, the 1999 Clinton trial was nonsense, but that’s because the charges were nonsense. Imagine Mueller’s witnesses on TV day after day testifying about Trump’s criminality. Wouldn’t a Republican “not guilty” vote after that be very damaging in at least some states?
5. Did the Founders intend impeachment to be dependent on being at least somewhat bipartisan? Probably, — impeachment is a political process, but not impeaching is also political.
6. If a Democrat had done a fraction of what Trump did, is there any doubt he/she would have been impeached by Republicans at the latest after revelation of the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting? Would impeaching Trump be replicating 1998/Clinton or would it be putting a “red line” on obvious criminal behavior by the President?
7. Is impeaching “going low” like Republicans do and risking division or is it standing up for what’s right?
8. On the statute of limitations bill, does Jerry really think he’ll get a veto-proof majority on that even if it passes both Houses?
Despite Trump’s vile, unacceptable behavior since 2015, no one with sufficient authority has stood up and said This is unacceptable. I’m not saying rush into impeachment. But the tacit acceptance of unacceptable behavior has to stop.