Impeachment Is Not a Coup

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

In his letter denouncing the impeachment investigation, Pat Cipollone accused Democrats of waging an “illegitimate” effort to “overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the president they have freely chosen.”

The president’s allies have either stuck to the same line or taken it further. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana did the former when he told Fox News that Democrats were “literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election, a year before Americans get to go to the polls to decide who’s going to be the president.” And Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, a pro-Trump political website, did the latter when she cast a hypothetical Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential election as part of an illegitimate attempt to overturn the results of the last contest:

-snip-

Each of these three arguments treats the 2016 result as sacrosanct, but the final claim is a bit more subtle: The American people chose Donald Trump and the only way to litigate that choice is in the next election. Anything else is an attack on democracy. The problems with this are endless. To start, impeachment is part of the constitutional structure, specifically created to deal with presidential misbehavior, including corrupt attempts to solicit foreign influence on elections.

Then there’s the secondary but still important fact that there’s no way Trump or his supporters can honestly claim the support of “the people.” Trump is president despite the wishes of the public. Voters did not want him in the White House, but our state-based system for choosing presidents — where the geographic distribution of your supporters is more important than the number you have — gave him a victory. As president, he has yet to earn a majority of the public’s support and in the last national election, his party suffered a decisive defeat, losing the lower chamber of Congress. At this moment, a majority of Americans support the impeachment inquiry. Trump is the legitimate president of the United States, but the idea that he represents “the people” — and that the investigation is an assault on their will — is untenable.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/impeachment-is-not-a-coup/ar-AAJzw7g?ocid=msn360

[muntrv]

1. They forgot about the 2018 election when they lost the House.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

2. in the last national election, his party suffered a decisive defeat, losing the lower chamber of

Congress.

Last paragraph.