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Old 10-09-2019, 08:19 AM   #8
Pete F.
Canceled
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: vt
Posts: 13,069
Here are a couple of calls for Trump's opponent to be impeached prior to election, look around and you can find more.

National Review
August 1, 2016
If the government were functioning properly, Congress would impeach Hillary Clinton, not refer her misconduct to the same administration that indulged it in the first place.

If Hillary Is Corrupt, Congress Should Impeach Her
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 23, 2016 4:20 PM
The Framers gave Congress a tool to police corrupt executive-branch officials — Congress should use it.
For our recent “Tricky Hillary” issue (National Review, Aug. 1, 2016, on NR Digital), I wrote a feature arguing that Mrs. Clinton should be impeached. Given that, through the last quarter-century of our politics, we have learned that pending Clinton scandals are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals, it comes as no surprise that my point has just been proven by a scandal that erupted last week.

Now Hillary didn't get elected but the second article is interesting and applicable to the current debacle.

The test of fitness for an office of public trust is whether an official is trustworthy, not whether she is convictable in a criminal court. Consequently, as I outlined in Faithless Execution, “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s trigger for impeachment — need not be violations of the penal code. As Hamilton explained, impeachable offenses are misconduct stemming “from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and are thus properly “denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

A public official may not be indicted by a grand jury for an extensive pattern of deceiving Congress and the public. There is no such penal offense. But it is most certainly grist for impeachment.

There is a commonsense reason why impeachable offenses are easier to prove than criminal offenses: Impeachment has nothing to do with the deprivation of a fundamental right — liberty and property are not at stake as they would be if a term of imprisonment and a fine could be imposed, as in a criminal case. In impeachment, the sole issue is whether a public trust should be removed because a government official has shown herself to be unworthy of it.

In impeachment, the official is held to a higher standard of conduct because public office is an extraordinary privilege, not a fundamental right. Public office is a trust with awesome attendant powers; a person may be manifestly unfit for it without having committed indictable crimes. Therefore, high crimes and misdemeanors — which, again, need not be indictable penal offenses — are easier to prove: Congress may fashion its own rules for the proceeding, there is no judicial oversight, and no requirement that all essential elements of criminal offenses be proved beyond a reasonable doubt under strict rules of evidence — Congress must merely determine that violations of the public trust have occurred and that they warrant removal of that trust. By contrast, because a criminal prosecution does involve the potential deprivation of fundamental rights, the standards of proof are more exacting and the protections of judicial due process are guaranteed.

This should be obvious for yet another reason: If impeachment were the equivalent of a criminal conviction, an impeached official could not be subjected to prosecution in addition to being impeached. That would violate the Constitution’s double-jeopardy principle. Our law, however, expressly prohibits such an outcome. In directing that the penalty for impeachment is limited to removal from office and disqualification from holding office in the future, the Constitution (in Article I, Section 3) provides that “the Party convicted [in a Senate impeachment trial] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

Again: The point is for Congress to strip the undeserving official of trust and power. Whether she also warrants criminal prosecution is separately determined by executive branch prosecutors.

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