The Muscovite Candidate

[Lord Jim]

Well what would you do? What do you think can be done? Why wasn’t this stuff presented to the electoral college; well, it is too late now he is president and will remain president unless he commits an impeachable act

Lib, if it's proven that he's being blackmailed by the Russians, that would be plenty impeachable...

[liberty]

Well what would you do? What do you think can be done? Why wasn’t this stuff presented to the electoral college; well, it is too late now he is president and will remain president unless he commits an impeachable act

Wes, if it's proven that he's being blackmailed by the Russians, that would be plenty impeachable...

Is it a crime to be the victim of blackmail? I am not sure it is even a crime to pay blackmail. It would seem that making it a crime to be the victim of blackmail would only make the position of blackmailers stronger.

[Big RR]

I'm not certain if it's a crime or not, but it would be the crime if you abused your position and did things to placate the blackmailer, from a sports player throwing a game to a president making policies which the blackmailers favor. And just as an FBI agent in a compromising position could be terminated, I would think a president who was in a similar position could be impeached if Congress chose to, whether or not (s)he made any such illegal decisions.

[Sue U]

Basically, impeachable offenses, a/k/a "high crimes and misdemeanors," are whatever Congress says they are; there is no requirement that they be any statutorily codified offenses.

High crimes and misdemeanors is a phrase from Section 4 of Article Two of the United States Constitution: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

"High" in the legal and common parlance of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of "high crimes" signifies activity by or against those who have special duties acquired by taking an oath of office that are not shared with common persons.[1] A high crime is one that can only be done by someone in a unique position of authority, which is political in character, who does things to circumvent justice. The phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" when used together was a common phrase at the time the U.S. Constitution was written and did not mean any stringent or difficult criteria for determining guilt. It meant the opposite. The phrase was historically used to cover a very broad range of crimes.

The Judiciary Committee's 1974 report "The Historical Origins of Impeachment" stated: "'High Crimes and Misdemeanors' has traditionally been considered a 'term of art', like such other constitutional phrases as 'levying war' and 'due process.' The Supreme Court has held that such phrases must be construed, not according to modern usage, but according to what the framers meant when they adopted them. Chief Justice [John] Marshall wrote of another such phrase:

It is a technical term. It is used in a very old statute of that country whose language is our language, and whose laws form the substratum of our laws. It is scarcely conceivable that the term was not employed by the framers of our constitution in the sense which had been affixed to it by those from whom we borrowed it."[2]

The constitutional convention adopted “high crimes and misdemeanors” with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well.[citation needed] Since 1386, the English parliament had used the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” to describe one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery.[citation needed] Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_crim ... sdemeanors

[Big RR]

Yep, impeachment is the safety valve to remove a president whenever Congress wants to--so long as requisite supermajorities in each house support it (an enormous hurdle occurring only three times in the House and never in the Senate). Trump may well prove the exception here and produce those in each house.

[liberty]

Yep, impeachment is the safety valve to remove a president whenever Congress wants to--so long as requisite supermajorities in each house support it (an enormous hurdle occurring only three times in the House and never in the Senate). Trump may well prove the exception here and produce those in each house.

The elites would like to get rid of Trump because his ideas could help the little guy and hurt the investments of the elites. Costing them money is an impeachable offense.

[Guinevere]

Scooter, Scooter - clean up in aisle 5 please.....

[Scooter]

The elites would like to get rid of Trump because his ideas could help the little guy and hurt the investments of the elites.

Well there goes another keyboard.

[Guinevere]

Ah we were posting at the same time.

[Scooter]

Yours too?

[Lord Jim]

Lib, could you please tell me one, (one will do ) of Trump's "ideas" that will help "the little guy"?

(And please be specific; don't give me "his idea that we should make America great again" or "his idea that we should have more good paying jobs"...)

[wesw]

the lowering of business taxes and reducing regulation of small businesses will do wonders.

making small business feasible for the average joe is a godsend..., if it happens.

[Scooter]

Someone continues to hack into wes's account and post in his name after he made it clear he was leaving.

One of the admins should look into this security breach.

[Crackpot]

Jim Ithink it's the one about bending over for the Russians.

[Lord Jim]

the lowering of business taxes and reducing regulation of small businesses

Those are things I also fully support, but here's the problem:

Those are not Trump ideas...

Those are mainstream Republican establishment positions that have been long held by the GOP. Trump may now be saying he supports them, but they sure as hell didn't originate with him. They don't meet the criteria lib posed:

The elites would like to get rid of Trump because his ideas could help the little guy and hurt the investments of the elites.

[Scooter]

Yes, I'm sure the "elites" are shuddering at the thought of the damage that lower business taxes will do to their investments.

[Lord Jim]

Trump has claimed from time to time that he would do things like make changes that would compel billionaire hedge fund managers to pay more in taxes, or that he would close the loopholes that enabled him to avoid paying taxes for 20 years...

But there is absolutely nothing in any of the proposals he or his team have put forward that would do any of those things.

[Lord Jim]

Then there are "ideas" that Trump has proposed, like protectionist tariffs and trade wars that would hurt "the elites" and their investments, but also hurt "the little guy" even worse...

To see the proof of how that works lib, I recommend you read the article by George F. Will that I posted:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16889

To meet your criteria, you need to point to something covers all three of these:

A. A genuine "Trump idea"
B.That hurts the "elites"
C. And helps "the little guy"

I wont hold my breath...

[liberty]

Lib, could you please tell me one, (one will do ) of Trump's "ideas" that will help "the little guy"?

(And please be specific; don't give me "his idea that we should make America great again" or "his idea that we should have more good paying jobs"...)

For Jim only:

Jim, I think you are a serious poster so I will take some of my valuable time to respond. I hope you are not expecting me to point to a specific factory. Instead look at the golden triangle of Mississippi where workers have gone from minimum wage to 40k a year. See the recent 60 minutes episode on CBS about the golden triangle. That is what I would like to see replicated across the country. If trump’s policies make it cheaper for corporations to build highly automated factories here rather than use overseas wage slave they will build the factories here and that will help the little guy. A high paying factory job is better than flipping burgers.

Jim, I never expected the guy to win" in a million years" and he is not the kind of a guy I would like as a friend, too much ego, but he has won, so I want to give him a chance.

[Econoline]

Well...as long as this thread already exists, I may as well put this here...

• • Is President Trump Prepared to Respond to the Ukraine Situation?
    
    This is a test

  BY ROBERT BATEMAN | FEB 2, 2017

  ---

  Russian interests are attacking Ukraine, again. Let us be clear about that. President Trump has pretty much done nothing. And now we are confused. So here are a few facts:
  

  • • The nation of Ukraine is a sovereign state.
    • They used to be a part of the USSR.
    • That ended when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of the Cold War.
    • Some Russians do not like that. But the fact remains, Ukraine is a sovereign nation.

  Over the past several years, many people have wondered if the country could stand on its own. After all, like all of the former "Warsaw Pact" and several former "Soviet" Republics (who are all NATO members now), Ukraine did not join NATO. Then Russia literally took over a whole region of Ukraine and annexed it, declaring it part of Russia again. That is undisputed.
  
  And so an independent nation is losing territory to an aggressive attack from conventional and unconventional forces led indirectly (but definitively) by Vladimir Putin.
  
  President Trump says that he thinks that the former head of the KGB is a good guy. He had, as he described it, a great conversation with the former Communist spymaster on Saturday. If that is true, then President Trump just got played for an actual fool. Again.
  
  Hours after Trump got off the phone with Putin, Russian munitions started landing upon civilians inside the nation of Ukraine. That is to say, inside a part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine that is being disputed by "rebel separatists." But these "separatists" in the area are just not just homegrown DIY "rebels." No, that cannot be true, because they can't make that artillery. To get that kind of firepower, you need munitions, and the munitions can only come from one place. (I really hope the former intel officer, Michael Flynn, explained this to the President.)
  
  Here is the thing about modern mass-fired rocket-artillery ammunition such as that which has been landing in Ukraine since just after President Trump got off the phone with Mr. Putin: You cannot make it in a garage. Each round is about a grapefruit-size in diameter, and the whole thing weighs about 1/2 of my own body weight. It is precisely engineered. Keep that in mind.
  
  We Americans have been fighting in several countries for 16 years now, and the general American public has become used to the idea that "rebels" or "insurgents" can build their tools in backyard toolshops. And that's true—when you are talking about IEDs, and car bombs (known to us as VBIEDs, that is Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices), and the ubiquitous suicide bomber vests.
  
  But tube-fired rocket artillery fired from conventional military rocket launchers? No chance.
  
  I have said it before, but I cannot avoid repeating what I taught my cadets at West Point or my graduate students at Georgetown University: Tactics wins battles, but logistics wins wars.
  
  Which brings us back to Southeastern Ukraine.
  
  Does mass artillery fire fit into your definition of "kerfuffle"? On Sunday, when the situation went, literally, ballistic, logistics began to matter. Firing that type of round means you have a supply, and that means a steady industrial factory source for these rockets.
  
  What seems clear is that the Russians (or their nominal proxies) started firing 40-round-per-vehicle bombardments by 122mm rockets (each carrying 44 lbs of warhead), fired from GRAD missile launchers. (Which happened to be banned in the last now-defunct ceasefire.)
  
  But Ukranians are also being hit by standard artillery and mortars.
  
  Ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, tallied 2,260 "ceasefire violations," and that was just on Sunday. Starting, or maybe just continuing, in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, the separatist forces launched another attack on the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka. The shelling seems to be continuing to this moment.
  
  Which sort of makes all of us wonder, what is Trump's response?

  ---

  http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ine-trump/

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