Never Trump activist Max Boot believes Democrats should impeach President Donald Trump to permanently “stain” his presidency and ensure that impeachment will be “mentioned in the first line of his obituary.”
The professional Never Trumper argued in a Washington Post column over the weekend that failing to impeach Trump could send a “message of impunity, whereas approving articles of impeachment, even if they do not result in removal, would at least leave a permanent stain on Trump’s presidency.”
“He would become only the third president in U.S. history, after [Bill] Clinton and Andrew Johnson, to be impeached. (Nixon resigned before the full House voted on articles of impeachment.) Future generations would remember Trump for the scoundrel that he is. His impeachment would be mentioned in the first line of his obituary,” Boot continued.
Boot claimed that “Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III just delivered the most devastating indictment of a sitting president’s behavior since Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s 1974 ‘road map’ for the impeachment” of President Richard Nixon and insisted that though “Mueller did not find evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to charge” Trump “or his subordinates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to influence the 2016 election,” Trump was, in his opinion, still “indeed guilty of collusion.”
He then claimed that the report’s “conclusions on obstruction are even more incriminating.”
“Mueller didn’t come out and say the president broke the law — but only, it seems, because he is precluded from doing so by the Justice Department policy that a president can’t be indicted,” Boot claimed. “Bending over backward to be fair, Mueller refused to level charges that Trump would not be able to confront in a court of law anytime soon. But anyone reading the Mueller report would have to conclude that the president is guilty as sin. He violated not only the obstruction-of-justice statute but also the Constitution itself.”
Boot said impeachment is actually “more practical” than prosecution because Democrats control the House, though he added that “it would be impossible to find 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump and remove him from office” not “because the evidence is weak,” but because “Republicans are more loyal to the rule of Trump than to the rule of law.”
Top and influential Democrats like Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, are already echoing these arguments about history, impunity, and impeachment. Cummings on Sunday said history “would smile upon” Democrats for “standing up for the Constitution.”
“Even if we did not win, possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution,” Cummings said CBS’s Face the Nation.
Cummings, who has not made up his mind about whether impeachment, also said Democrats cannot do nothing after the release of Mueller’s report and let an “emboldened” Trump get away with his misdeeds.
“If we do nothing here, what is going to happen is that the president is going to be emboldened. He’s going to be emboldened because he’s said, ‘Well, I got away with that,'” Cummings said. “We cannot afford that. Our democracy cannot afford that.”