On today’s BradCast: Donald Trump holds his first solo press conference as President…and it’s a doozy. But just before that presser was going on at the White House, so was another at the National Press Club in D.C. to announce that nearly 1 million signatures calling for Trump’s immediate impeachment were being delivered to Congress. [Audio link to complete show follows below.]
Journalist, author and activist Norman Solomon of Roots Action — who, with Free Speech for People, have created the ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org campaign — joins us to explain the grounds for the remarkable effort to begin Congressional proceedings to remove Trump from office, not even one month into his Presidency.
“This is a very long process, but not as long as many people think. This could be a lot quicker than we might have imagined just a few weeks ago,” Solomon tells me, detailing what he sees as crystal clear violations of the U.S. Constitution’s foreign and domestic “Emoluments” clauses, as well as a number of statutes as well.
Solomon charges that “It’s such a dangerous precedent to have a President willfully, flagrantly, violating the Constitution,” why he believes this can be done even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, and why the question of whether Vice President Mike Pence would be even worse for progressives, if he were to ascend to the Presidency, does not matter.
“If we shrug and say ‘Well, we don’t think it’s practical’, or ‘We don’t like the result of the Vice President becoming President’, then we’ve bought further into what, frankly, is moving towards dictatorship,” he argues. “If we say this is okay, that the President is above the supreme law of the land, then that opens the floodgates to autocracy and the antithesis of democracy.”
The author of War Made Easy: How President and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death also discusses what he sees as the “big danger” of “Democrats attacking Trump with over-the-top extreme rhetoric” concerning Russia.
Then, Desi Doyen joins us for our 8th Anniversary(!) episode of the Green News Report! And, finally, I respond to some listener mail which disagrees with my take on the Logan Act (as detailed during Tuesday’s BradCast), and how some believe it should be used to prosecute former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in regard to his conversation about sanctions with Russia’s ambassador prior to the Inauguration…
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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_TrumpPressConf_NormanSolomonImpeachment_021617.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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If Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III does not recuse himself and appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate Michael Flynn and the Russian connection, he should also be subject to impeachment.
I certainly agree with Norm Solomon that the grounds for impeachment are readily apparent. But it is simply not realistic to think that there was any chance of securing a majority of the GOP controlled House of Representatives to vote to impeach let alone secure the needed 2/3 of the GOP controlled Senate to vote to convict/remove Trump from office — certainly less likely than Dennis Kucinich’s failed effort after he introduced Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush on June 9, 2008.
You can’t persuade unscrupulous Republicans to adhere to principle.
I think it more realistic to believe that impeachment could be made a central issue for the 2018 mid-term.
But we can prepare the battlefield for invasion. There needs to be a steady truth bombardment of what impeachable and indictable offenses have been–and are being–committed. The opposition must be made to scramble and keep their heads down. Being relentless is the key to victory.