One Sure Thing: Trump Beats Impeachment
Despite the public furor surrounding James Comey’s Senate testimony, there remains only one certainty about the future of the Trump administration: the president will not be forced from office through the Constitutional impeachment process. Pundits and politicos who agitate for using that mechanism to end the Age of Trump ignore history, delude themselves and damage the country.
Only three presidents of the prior 44 have faced serious drives for their impeachment:
Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1998. All three confronted an awkward political reality that left them vulnerable to the opposition party, with the president’s bitter enemies controlling both houses of Congress.
This meant that critics of the chief executive could get a majority of the House of Representatives to vote articles of impeachment on a strictly partisan basis, with no reliance on defectors from the president’s own party. That’s precisely what occurred for Johnson and Clinton, and was about to happen with Nixon when he short-circuited the process by resigning his office…. Read the full column at USATODAY.COM