sawdust
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2013
- Messages
- 3,177
- Reaction score
- 1,533
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian - Right
You too miss the point. Of course the house and senate prosecute the process, and of course impeachment has legal and constitutional basis. But Americans, and members of the House and Senate are Americans, too, don't hold there presidents accountable. Just look around DP. It's a daily orgasmic frenzy of right wingers piling on Obama, and mostly correctly pointing out wrong doing, even unconstitutional action. And the partisan lefties are wore plum out by them, justifying, defending and excusing their president. I'm talking about partisan democrats in the house and senate as well. The exact opposite was the case during the last administration. If a GOPer should happen to win the WH next go around, stay tuned, because you will see a complete roll reversal on this board. Very few here acknowledge the sins of presidents from both parties, and want to see an end to corruption in Washington. Same being true across the country and the reason that it persists, and likely never will end.
I think that you are assigning too much power to the public. Look at the Clinton impeachment. The American public who paid attention to it saw it largely as amusement. There was no outrage. It was a show trial. Nobody really cared about it other than Lindsay Graham and a few other congresscritters. It was a lesson learned in congress that unless there is serious public outrage it's not worth the effort. Because impeachment is a political process and not a criminal proceeding and Americans are largely disengaged politically it's going to take something really extraordinary to make it happen again.
In addition, nobody in congress really wants to see our first black president recorded in history as being impeached.