On the menu today: Congressional Democrats launch their impeachment effort and make just about every mistake possible along the way, sorting through what we don’t know about the president’s actions last Wednesday, and Joe Biden and his team belatedly realize that keeping their promises about vaccinating America will be harder to keep than they thought.
A Stumbling Start to the Impeachment Effort
Donald Trump deserves to be impeached. But as of this writing, Congress is going about it all wrong.
Our Andy McCarthy lays out the problems in the current language of the article of impeachment for “incitement to insurrection.” Andy’s convinced what Trump did was terrible, but the incitement part is legally debatable, and the insurrection part is legally disputable. Andy thinks a different set of charges would more accurately apply:
If what the Democrats truly want is bipartisan consensus in the service of national security, rather than political combat, the articles of impeachment they plan to file should charge the president with (a) subversion of the Constitution’s electoral process, particularly the Twelfth Amendment counting of the sovereign states’ electoral votes; (b) recklessly encouraging a raucous political demonstration that foreseeably devolved into a violent storming of the seat of our government; and (c) depraved indifference to the welfare of the vice president, Congress, security personnel, and other Americans who were in and around the Capitol on January 6.
That would be an accurate description of impeachable offenses. It would not disintegrate into legal wrangling over incitement, insurrection, and causation.
