One thing I keep thinking about re: potential impeachment is that a Trump is in his first term. Seems like this will have a large effect on the politics. 1/
Clinton, Nixon, & Johnson were all lame ducks. Nixon and Clinton were barred by the 22nd amendment; Johnson—essentially a War Democrat put on the ticket for balance in 1864—had literally no chance of being nominated by the GOP in 1868. Trump, OTOH, is the presumptive GOP nominee.
This raises a serious question: as a purely political matter, would the Dems really want to remove a POTUS who, conditional on having the votes to remove, would be an absolute disaster candidate in ‘20?
Obviously, there are non-partisan and good government reasons to remove a president who deserves to be removed. But it’s hard to see, in say December 2019, how that would politically help Dems.
In fact, if POTUS was at, say, 26% approval and there were enough GOP votes in Senate to convict, it might be the *GOP* that wanted him gone, if a brutal primary fight was on the horizon. Dems might prefer him twisting in the wind.
This is not to say such events would come about. It’s just to put forward the idea that at the very moment Trump might become removable from office, the Dems might cease to actually want to remove him.
There might even be good ideological reasons not to remove a removable President like Trump; repudiation at the polls probably kills Trumpism, where removal might fuel it’s future.
Anyway, I know this is mostly half-baked, but I still think people are underestimating how much the first-term scenario matters.
