Michael MacFarlane
Unwitting troll accomplice
Posts: 8,272
Gonna just try and do a thorough primer on impeachment here (obviously you, Kroko, understand a lot of this already but I want to work from the bottom up here so it's as broadly instructive as possible):
The United States has two legislative houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The House of Representatives consists of one representative per district, with districts having roughly equal population across the country (and as a natural consequence, more populous states having more districts).
The Senate consists of two representatives per state, and it shouldn't exist.
In a traditional criminal proceeding, the prosecutor determines what charges should be brought against a defendant, and the court determines whether the defendant is guilty of those charges. An impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, but I think it's a little bit useful to think of the House of Representatives as the prosecutor in an impeachment, and the Senate as the Court.
(Republicans, by the way, have tried to complain that the President's due process rights are not being respected. This is silly for a lot of reasons, but the main reason it's silly is that even in a criminal prosecution, no potential defendant is entitled to participate in the prosecutor's investigation into whether they should be charged.)
Sorry for the sidebar. So if the House is like a prosecutor, an impeachment is like a prosecutor charging (usually "indicting") a defendant, right? Almost completely yes. Generally, a prosecutor can indict a person within her jurisdiction for breaking the laws of that jurisdiction. The House of Representatives, if we view it as a kind of prosecutor for impeachment purposes, has a very limited jurisdiction as to the people it may impeach, but so broad an ambit of offenses it may impeach those people for that it would make an Alabama prosecutor blush.
How broad? The text of the Constitution says an official may be impeached for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Treason, of course, is explicitly defined in Article III, Section 3. (This unusual constitutional clarity does not stop various dumbasses from claiming that Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden or Reality Winner have committed treason, but oh well.) Bribery, well, we know what that is, and we've all agreed to call it "campaign finance" instead. But then there's "high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
Most legal/constitutional scholars agree that that last phrase is to be interpreted broadly, that an impeachable offense is, to quote then-Vice President Gerald Ford, "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." In fact, as far as I know, no Republican member of Congress is even insisting that Trump must be charged with a specific crime. (There may be some institutional memory at work here; Republicans were never able to pin perjury on Clinton either.)
All of this is to say, impeachment is political. It's not a trial in an impartial court. A public official could sneeze at the wrong time and be impeached and removed if the opposing party thought they could get away with it. A public official could also direct charitable funds to his reelection campaign, steer foreign dignitaries to properties he owned, use federal funds to pay for his frequent vacations, and withhold congressionally allocated aid to pressure a foreign government to assist his reelection campaign, so long as he was assured of his party's support in the Senate.
So anyway, Kroko, you asked whether anything's going to come of impeaching Trump, in light of Republicans' control of the Senate, the court where impeachment is tried. The answer is no, unless Republican senators think they might lose their seats by not opposing Trump. So the answer is no.
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Son of Krokodile XVI