It’s not so much “when you’ve lost the National Review…”, but the attempt to ensure that there might be an autonomous, conservative GOP rather than a Trumpist party. Aside from fanciful premises about “process” repeated during the House floor debate, the National Review still supports impeachment.
He urged a crowd to march on the U.S. Capitol and pressure his vice president and Congress to abuse their authority and overturn the results of a free and fair election that he happened to lose.
When the rabble forced its way into the U.S. Capitol and disrupted the counting of electoral votes, the president couldn’t bring himself to forthrightly tell the rioters to stop. He didn’t release a video telling them to go home until hours later and didn’t condemn the violence until the next day, reportedly only under pressure from his aides.
Last Wednesday came in the context of the president’s lobbying to get Republican officials in states to throw the election to him (most infamously in his phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger) and his ceaseless campaign of misinformation meant to delegitimize an American election.
The op-ed stressed that President Trump “urged a crowd to march on the U.S. Capitol and pressure his vice president and Congress to abuse their authority” to overturn a free and fair election that Joe Biden clearly won.
As the mob breached the Capitol, Trump failed to forthrightly tell the rioters to stop, The Editors write, and the violence that ensued was the culmination of Trump's “ceaseless campaign of misinformation meant to delegitimize an American election.”
According to The Editors, Trump's potential second impeachment would be different from the first one.
[…]
“People of good will can disagree about the best response to the last two months and especially last week, but about one thing there can be no question — it's the recklessness and selfishness of one man that brought us to this place,” they write.
And yet there remain other options including the 14th Amendment, article 3.
“If Congress is wise, it will make use of the tyranny-fighting tools left to us by our political ancestors in the 14th Amendment to hold Trump accountable for his indefensible disloyalty.”
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Thrilled to share my debut column with @NBCNewsThink!
It's time to consider applying the 14th Amendment's Rebellion Clause to Donald Trump's indefensible disloyalty. https://t.co/Sdgoqxbmmn
The imminent threat of anti-government violence to post-Civil War legislators accounts in part for the stark clarity with which they wrote the 14th Amendment, especially the section governing what ought to be done with seditionists. Its Republican authors, like Rep.John Binghamof Ohio, witnessed the ruinous outcome of sedition carried to its logical extreme. They understood the solemn value of an oath, in this case the oath of office sworn by our federal officials to defend the Constitution and the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On Jan. 6, too many Republicans didn't honor their oaths — none more so than the president.
“The language in Section Three applies to anybody who has made an oath to the Constitution and then violates that oath,” Eric Foner, a Civil War historian and Columbia University professor emeritus,toldThe Washington Post. “It's pretty simple.”
[…]
In an op-ed for The Post, Foner laid out the straightforward mechanics of a14th Amendment charge: Legislators file a resolution, then both chambers vote. In that sense, it would be a triumph of the regular democratic process — the process Trump's thugs tried to undermine — that delivers a final defeat to the president's stained legacy.
The case for applying the language to Trump may also be clearer than that of impeachment, because the 14th Amendment's permanent ban on future public service emphasizes for all future generations the severity of Trump's treachery and doesn't require the Senate to take a separate vote, as during the impeachment process.
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