The duty to impeach Mad King Donald

Members of Congress take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Everything following “support”—the part about defending the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”—was added during the Civil War. And Donald Trump is exactly what they were talking about: an enemy of the Constitution who seeks to set himself up as a virtual king, above the law and accountable to no one. Their oaths make it clear that members of Congress have a sworn duty to protect the Constitution from him, and “Impeachment is a remedy for a runaway president,” as Texas Representative Al Green told Democracy Now! On March 7.

In 2017, Green was the first congress member to call for Trump’s impeachment and he’s working to do it again.

“I believe that he has done things that would merit impeachment,” Green said, noting that “If we wanted to impeach a president for speaking ill of Congress, as the president did, we can do it,” since that happened in 1868. Impeachment, Green said, “is what Gerald Ford said when he was in the House: whatever a given Congress concludes that it is on a given time — at a given time.”

The next week, on March 12, constitutional attorney John Bonifaz told Democracy Now! about a grassroots impeachment campaign that’s already gained more than a quarter million signatures. “This president has already committed multiple abuses of power since assuming the presidency,” Bonifaz said. “And the framers designed the Constitution to ensure that we would not have a monarch or a tyrant govern this nation.”

The petition can be found at impeachtrumpagain.org, which explains:

Congress should have opened an impeachment investigation into Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clauses and into his unlawful, corrupt campaign practices on Day 1 of Trump’s second administration. Since taking office, Trump has committed a growing list of impeachable offenses.

It goes on to present a list of 13 specific charges that Congress should investigate, many with further specific subpoints. While all are serious, five of them are most closely tied to Trump’s attempt to set himself up as a would-be absolute monarch, undermining any countervailing power:

• Unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s powers
• Refusing to adhere to court orders
• Abusing his power to seek retribution against perceived adversaries
• Co-opting and Dismantling Independent Government Oversight
• Unconstitutionally usurping local and state authority

Curiously missing from this list was Trump’s efforts to intimidate, if not jail or silence critical voices in the press, an oversight that Trump himself underscored two days later when he illegally delivered a political speech at the Department of Justice, where he called CNN, MSNBC, and unspecified newspapers illegal, signally his intention to silence, if not imprison, his critics. “They’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” he said of the cable channels, adding, “These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal.”

While all the above reflect Trump’s dictatorial ambitions that Congress has a duty to defend against, they don’t exhaust the list of his impeachable conduct. Other specific charges from impeachtrumpagain.orginclude:

• Abusing the pardon power
• Abusing the emergency power
• Receiving foreign and domestic emoluments
• Depriving citizens of their birthright citizenship
• Corruptly dismissing criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams
• Blocking efforts to secure U.S. elections
• Engaging in unlawful, corrupt practices during the 2024 presidential campaign

But even these do not exhaust the list. Trump’s sweeping efforts to wantonly slash the federal government aren’t just a violation of Congress’s power of the purse, they’re also a profound injury to the American people, in violation of the Constitution’s preamble: that it was established to “promote the general welfare and provide for the common defense.”

Green appeared on Democracy Now! the day after the House censured him for daring to challenge Trump during his address to Congress, saying Trump had “no mandate to cut Medicaid!” But Trump is going much further than cutting Medicaid—he’s going after Social Security and Medicare, which are bedrocks in promoting the general welfare, in addition to numerous other injuries to the general welfare, such as defunding biomedical research, shutting down national parks, slashing the National Weather Service, and much more.

Trump’s attacks on Social Security are being led by unelected co-president Elon Musk, whose false claims of massive fraud (a 10,000% exaggeration) have already justified terminating payments to recipients, while an internal memo obtained by Popular Information, lays out a plan to sabotage the agency, simultaneously slashing staff and closing offices, while forcing hundreds of thousands if not millions of beneficiaries to go to extraordinary lengths to secure the benefits they’re entitled to.

The endgame—shared by rightwing ideologues for generations—is to make the system so dysfunctional that people will agree to privatize it, resulting in billions, if not trillions of dollars being transferred from people who paid into the system into the pockets of Wall Street billionaire oligarchs—if not Musk himself, as he expands his financial interests. Such a wealth transfer is the exact opposite of promoting the general welfare—a direct violation of the Constitution’s preamble.

But there’s another way in which Trump’s actions are impeachable: as violations of the Constitution’s “Take Care” clause. Article II, Section 3 states that, among other things, the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is exactly the opposite of what Trump has done. He’s sought to turn the laws inside out to serve his own narrow interests, and those of close allies like Musk, who’s seen dozens of investigations into his businesses shut down since Trump’s inauguration.

In Trump’s first term, it took a long time for Green to build support for impeachment, until Trump blatantly crossed the line, withholding congressionally appropriated funds in an attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a phony investigation into Joe Biden. This term, Trump began similar efforts almost immediately. Impounding Congressionally-approved funds have garnered the most attention by far, thanks to Musk’s chainsaw approach. But Trump is also blackmailing Zelenskyy with a different end in mind: Rewarding his Russian handler, Vladimir Putin, for his murderous invasion of Ukraine. And in the wake of his recent DOJ speech, he’s made clear his intention to continue phony investigations against Biden and those Trump sees as aligned with him.

On social media Trump said he no longer considered valid the pardons Biden granted to people Trump might target because they were signed using an autopen, which is not merely an uncontroversial method of affixing a presidential signature that Trump himself has used, it’s the modern version of a device first used and praised by Thomas Jefferson.

All this shows that Trump is completely undeterred from the kind of conduct he was impeached for in his first term—conduct that culminated with an armed attack on the Capitol, a failed coup. It’s clear that such conduct warrants impeachment again. “But what’s the point?” you might ask, given how little effect it had last time.

The answer lies in the streets, rather than in Congress or the Courts. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Recent research has shown that nonviolent protest movements almost inevitably drive autocrats from power once they reach a threshold of 3.5% of the population. That’s what a study of 323 violent and nonviolent movements from 1900 to 2006 showed, described in the 2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” Chenoweth told the BBC in 2019.

As Rachel Maddow noted on her March 17 show, such movements are now surging in response to the autocratic wave that Trump is a part of. Other countries, like Hungary and Syria, are well ahead of us because their autocrats have been in power much longer. But protests here in America are mushrooming at an astonishing speed, in a wide variety of venues for a wide variety of specific causes. Adding the broad call for Trump’s impeachment to the specifics of each local protest is a logical way for Americans to do what others have done before them to get rid of autocratic authoritarian leaders. Congress has a duty to impeach Trump. And the people have the power to make that happen. It may not be clear from American history. But world history holds out more promise.

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