CommonDreams – With a new poll of U.S. voters on Sunday showing that less than one-third support his abrupt ouster of FBI Director James Comey last week, the talk of impeaching President Donald Trump and demands for a special prosecutor to investigate possible ties between his campaign and alleged Russian interference in last year’s election have reached their highest levels to date.
The new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday shows that only 29% of all respondents approved of Comey’s firing while over 50% percent of those who said they knew “a lot” about how those events unfolded said they disapprove of the president’s behavior.
“Arguably he’s already obstructed justice and already violated the emoluments clause. I’m not saying we should impeach him now, I’m calling for an impeachment investigation.”
—History professor Allan LichtmanWith Comey’s controversial dismissal coinciding with a new round of opinion polls that show Trump’s approval ratings stuck at historically low levels, a survey from Quinnipiac last week showed that the top three words that popped into respondents’ heads when asked to describe President Trump were: ‘idiot’; ‘incomepetent’; and ‘liar’—in that order.
In the wake of Comey’s firing and Trump’s subsequent explanation last week, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Trump’s firing of Comey reminded him of the so-called “Doomsday Clock,” a project run by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which seeks to warn the world about the encroaching threat of nuclear and other forms of human annihilation. “Maybe we should start an impeachment [clock],” Pocan tweeted. “This moved us an hour closer to midnight.”
In a widely-circulated op-ed written by Laurence Tribe on Saturday, the Harvard constitutional law professor explained why the prospect of impeachment proceedings should now be front and center. According to Tribe, though Trump’s firing of Comey is itself troubling, the case against Trump goes well beyond that.
“Even without getting to the bottom of what Trump dismissed as ‘this Russia thing,'” writes Tribe, “impeachable offenses could theoretically have been charged from the outset of this presidency. One important example is Trump’s brazen defiance of the foreign emoluments clause, which is designed to prevent foreign powers from pressuring U.S. officials to stray from undivided loyalty to the United States. Political reality made impeachment and removal on that and other grounds seem premature.” But, he adds, “No longer. To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader.”
