We’ve all heard about the impeachment process against Donald Trump.
However, how many really understand what this means, what impeachment actually consists
of and the history of this process in the United States?
I can already tell you that this process is much, much more complex than a mere debate
about the President’s impeachment.
You see, the American Constitution defines impeachment as a tool to be used only in extremely
exceptional cases.
With it, the legislative power can practically reverse the people’s will.
A will expressed through the election of the president.
Therefore, under very serious circumstances, an impeachment implies the overriding of the
democratic electoral regime.
We’re talking about a process designed for cases in which the president has committed
serious crimes, crimes that must be clearly demonstrated after a thorough prior investigation
by the House of Representatives.
Mainly, these crimes include cases of treason, bribery, and other serious unspecified crimes.
However, even with this explanation, we still need more information to be able to fully
understand how impeachment works.
That’s why in this video we’re not only going to talk about this curious process,
we’re also going to take a look at its history and talk about past cases of impeachment in
the United States, the circumstances that caused them and the outcomes.
And yes, why not, we’ll also do a round up on the impeachment that the current President
of the United States, Donald Trump, is facing.
Listen up.
(IMPEACHMENT, A KEY COUNTERWEIGHT)
Something good about American democracy is that it was designed specifically to limit
the power of politicians.
You see, the curious thing about the United States is that both the Constitution and the
US Bill of Rights are limiting.
This means that if you read the US Constitution, you’ll soon realize that what it truly says
helps prevent the State – or the people who control the state – from exercising
excessive power over the rest of the citizens.
This strongly differentiates it from most of the world's constitutions, which focus
on defining the rights and obligations of the people.
And this is fundamental, essential for understanding the meaning of impeachment in the United States.
Allow me to explain; the Founding Fathers established the possibility of dismissing
the president and other senior officials from the very beginning.
They defined the process as a political instead of a criminal trial.
That way, the president could be removed from his functions due to serious crimes without
any judge ruling for or against him at any moment during the process.
In fact, the only judge present during the entire impeachment process is the president
of the Supreme Court, who’s responsible for overseeing the operation of the political
trial once it passes to the Senate.
But the “sentence” – in this case, dismissal – is decided solely and exclusively by the
senators.
By this point many of you may be thinking...
But, wait, if this is a political process, then it could be used against any president
who the opposition simply doesn’t like, right?
Well, the truth is, no.
In practice, that isn’t possible in the North American system.
To prevent the process being abused, a series of complicated steps were established to not
only guarantee the completion of a justified impeachment process, but also to limit the
number of cases beginning.
So much so that to this date, in the almost 250 years of United States history, not a
single effective impeachment has yet occurred.
Not even one.
Moreover, in that entire time only two processes have been started, well, three if we take
the current one against Donald Trump into account.
Three in the entire history of the US.
Now, how exactly does this process work?
What are the steps that lead to dismissal?
Well, first there needs to be a reason, evidence that the president was involved in one of
the crimes mentioned in the Constitution.
With this, any member of the House of Representatives can propose an impeachment or political trial
under oath.
In Trump’s case it was the President of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
Then, the committees responsible for investigating the case and determining the facts attributable
to the impeachment are designated.
Finally, these committees write one or several articles that are voted for individually or
jointly by the House of Representatives.
This step is equivalent to presenting charges against the President.
To understand this better, the House of Representatives’ mission in this case is to present charges.
If it does, the impeachment or political judgment truly begins and the entire process is transferred
to the Senate, which plays the main role in this entire story.
So in fact it’s actually there, in the Senate, where the political trial takes place.
In this way, the Senate acts as a court.
But instead of judges, prosecutors and jurors, the members of the House of Representatives
act as prosecutors, and the Senators as jurors.
So, if the senators vote in favor of dismissal with a two-thirds majority, this is equivalent
to a jury convicting the accused in a normal trial.
A successful impeachment means nothing other than the automatic removal of the president
and the transfer of his powers to the Vice President.
It seems complex, doesn’t it?
Actually, it is, but it’s also quite logical.
Think about it for a moment, it has to be a very stringent process so that a president
can’t be dismissed impulsively, like someone grabbing a bargain on Black Friday.
But, now that we know how it works, the next big question is: what can we learn from the
history of political trials in the United States?
As we told you earlier, besides Trump, there are only two more cases to examine: those
of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
And... in the case of Richard Nixon, well his presidency actually ended with a premature
resignation and, despite what is commonly thought, the impeachment process never even
started.
But do you want to know more about what happened in those cases?
Let’s take a look!
(TWO IMPEACHMENTS, ONE RESIGNATION AND ZERO REMOVALS)
The history of political trials in the United States is short, very short.
Only two presidents have been submitted to them and neither one was dismissed.
Perhaps the least known case is that of Andrew Johnson.
And it’s not surprising, because we’re talking about a man who was president between
1865 and 1869…
But... what did this man do to end up being judged by the American Senate?
Well... after President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Johnson, who was his vice president,
became president.
After he took command, his policies moved far... far away from Lincoln's.
He was basically a cowboy.
To give you an idea, Johnson was both a member of the Democratic Party and a dedicated white
supremacist.
That is, he was extremely racist.
Someone who would make Trump look like a poster boy for multiculturalism and diversity.
Yes, Andrew Johnson strongly defended the slavery of African-Americans and dedicated
himself to vetoing each and every one of the bills that Congress had passed to recognize
the rights of freed slaves.
He also began pardoning generals of the Confederate States of America, who were the ones who had
rebelled against the United States by starting the Civil War.
Those states, the states that rebelled, considered Lincoln a threat to white supremacy, and they
strongly opposed his plan to abolish slavery throughout the country.
This really didn’t sit well with them.
And you also have to remember that some of these states had a slave population of 49%.
But if his actions already seem serious, wait till I tell you about the final straw.
Johnson had the brilliant idea of ​​personally firing and appointing secretaries for his
government, bypassing Congress’s validation, which, as you can imagine, isn’t legal.
Well... you can get an idea of just how complicated it is to dismiss a president, when despite
all these serious accusations, Johnson was saved by just one vote in the Senate.
A single vote that prevented them from reaching the necessary two thirds majority.
He was barely saved, but saved all the same.
In fact, this was by far the closest a US president got to being dismissed.
The next “attempt” came with Richard Nixon, more than a century later, after the infamous
Watergate Scandal in 1972, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about.
To refresh your memory, the Watergate Case was a scandal that involved the president
and several CIA agents who were spying on the Democratic Party.
They raided Democratic party headquarters and tapped calls to gain an advantage in Nixon’s
reelection as president.
Later, during the investigation, it was discovered that this illegal eavesdropping had been controlled
directly by the White House.
This news triggered calls for an impeachment process against the president in 1972.
In fact, dear friends of VisualPolitik, the thing got so serious that literally everyone
turned their backs on Nixon.
And because he didn’t want the investigation to proceed – in case dirtier issues came
up, because, let’s face it, Nixon was a rather shady president – after seven months
of deliberations he resigned the day before the House of Representatives were to vote
to start the process.
One day before.
So, the truth is that the impeachment mechanism was never launched in Nixon’s case.
But it was launched against Clinton.
Oh Clinton, Clinton...
Bill Clinton really messed up!
And he messed up very deeply.
I’m sure many of you have heard the name Monica Lewinsky.
Am I wrong?
At the end of the 90s, the affair, the slip, the... extramarital meetings between the then
intern, Monica Lewinsky, and Bill Clinton were common knowledge in Washington, without
his wife, Hillary, knowing anything about it.
But don’t be mistaken.
The reason why an impeachment process was started against Bill Clinton didn’t have
anything to do with the president being unfaithful to his wife.
Not at all.
The real reason, or at least the reason for which the process was justified, were Clinton's
lies, as well as his pressuring of others around him to also lie to hide a sordid story
that took place behind the closed doors of the Oval Office.
And believe me when I tell you that in the United States – at least until Trump arrived
– catching a president in a lie – and forcing those around him to lie – wasn’t
viewed well, not at all.
So now that we’ve looked at past impeachments and how they work ... What about Trump?
Well... now it's his turn.
The truth is that things don’t look very good, because everything indicates that he’s
done something very serious.
So what exactly are the accusations against Trump?
Can this process affect him in 2020?
Listen up.
(TRUMP, BIDEN AND UKRAINE.
A JUICY PLOT?)
Trump's case... started a long way back.
And far away as well.
More specifically, in Ukraine.
But...
What on earth does Trump have to do with Ukraine and why is Joe Biden in this section’s title?
Well, the truth is that this is none other than the latest chapter in the – often absurdist
– Trump presidency.
Basically, everything indicates that Trump asked the new Ukrainian president, Volodímir
Zelenski, directly by phone, to investigate Biden and his relations with the gas company
Burisma, in which Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who was Barack Obama’s former
vice president and one of the future Democratic candidates for the White House, was a board
member.
Shortly before this call, Trump froze almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, apparently
as a pressure method.
This could be considered a bribe in exchange for a favor.
A quid pro quo.
But it doesn’t end there.
Even the US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, acknowledged being pressured by Trump to force
the Ukrainian government to investigate a supposed theory that Ukraine would have interfered
with the 2016 American presidential elections.
And no, this time it wasn’t to favor Trump, which Russia is accused of having done, but
to favor Hillary.
And you can imagine how Ukraine’s investigations are handled, especially if they’re done
under pressure from Washington.
In other words, Trump seems to be using the United States government’s means and resources
to pressure governments from foreign countries that have a more than questionable rule of
law to dig up dirt against his opponents.
Unbelievable!
Given the seriousness of these claims, Congress decided
to open an impeachment process to thoroughly investigate this entire matter, and to figure
out if President Trump bribed the Ukrainians to gain campaign data.
And it doesn't end there.
Apparently, Trump created a kind of “parallel diplomacy” with Ukraine, which lay outside
the institutional channels.
He used his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, even forcing Gordon Sondland to answer to
him.
Now, is this enough to kick out the president?
We don’t know, but what we do know is that information keeps being uncovered, further
complicating Trump's situation.
Information like this.
(AUDIO: “New Documents Reveal Details of Pompeo’s Role in Ukraine Affair
Emails and documents released by the State Department support testimony showing Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo enabled the Ukrainian pressure campaign at the center of the impeachment
proceedings”.
The New York Times)
(AUDIO: “According to testimony in the impeachment inquiry, Ukrainian diplomats in Washington
knew there was a problem with aid as early as July 25, the day Mr. Trump spoke with the
Ukrainian president by phone and asked him to investigate his rivals”.
- The New York Times)
The truth is that, for the time being, the Republican Party doesn’t seem to want to
turn its back on the president under the current accusations.
Especially when the elections are so close...
Politicians!
All this could change however if what is known in the United States as a “smoking gun”
is unleashed, that is, if information that could bring down the president, and that is
100% proven, demonstrated and explosive, is revealed.
But until that happens, and if it happens, it’s normal for the Republicans to support
Trump in order to hold on to the presidency.
Also remember that in the Senate, which is where the impeachment is decided, Republicans
hold a majority.
As it stands, the Democrats’ only hope would be to find flagrant evidence that Trump really
bribed the Ukrainian authorities to do all that is claimed.
Undoubtedly, this is quite the drama.
We’ll be watching to see how this mess develops.
But now it's your turn.
After knowing how impeachment works, how past cases happened and why they happened, do you
think Trump could be dismissed or will this process end up as another failed case?
What do you think of the political trial process as a counterweight to the presidents’ power?
Leave your answer in the comments.
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