Despite all the quasi-patriotic chest beating by far-left Democrats like Steve Cohen of Tennessee, the party seems to be waking up to the reality that the risks of filing articles of impeachment, especially in an election year, greatly outweigh the rewards. Some Democratic members of Congress are exploring back-door options for removing Donald Trump, such as having him declared mentally unfit. Accordingly, they plan on having a bevy of mental health “experts” come to Capitol Hill to provide grounds for removing the president under the twenty-fifth amendment.
Others appear resigned to the lesser prize of censuring Trump. The Hill has the details:
House Democrats are eyeing a move to censure President Trump as a possible alternative to impeaching a president they have accused of gross wrongdoing while in office.
A censure resolution — essentially a public reprimand — lacks the teeth of impeachment’s intrinsic threat to remove a sitting president. But supporters say it would send a clear and immediate message to voters that Democrats are taking seriously their constitutional responsibility to be a check on executive misconduct.
[…]
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who’s calling for immediate censure of Trump, said it would send a warning to future administrations that Congress won’t sit idle in the face of presidential malfeasance.
The advantage of a censure over impeachment is that it requires no Senate support and could be carried out without a single Republican vote. The disadvantage is that a censure is weak tea. “We can hold the president accountable and say that his actions are unethical, and he’s engaged in blatant misconduct and that there can be some accountability for future presidents,” Khanna is quoted as saying before adding, “It’s a permanent mark on the president’s record.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Apparently, Khanna was one of those kids in school who dreaded the prospect of “black marks” on their “permanent record.”
As for Congress’s unwillingness to “sit idle in the face of presidential malfeasance,” we witnessed almost eight years of precisely that during the previous administration.
