On This Day in History: December 18

The first impeachment of Danger Yam

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In over two centuries of the USA being a thing, three presidents have been impeached. And Nixon wasn’t one of them; he resigned before impeachment. But Donnie Dumbfuck was, and he should have been convicted too, but presidents don’t get convicted in ‘murica, because then people would have to admit they fucked up in choosing the guy. And just like going into Vietnam, Americans have a hard time admitting they’ve made a terrible mistake.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 18, 2019—

Being impeached is like being indicted. It means enough evidence has been brought forth that prosecutors believe they have a case against you, and you get charged and put on trial. The first president to be impeached was Abraham Lincoln’s VP. After Abe got dead, Andrew Johnson took over as president; Johnson was racist and generally a shit human being. In 1868 Congress impeached him for firing and replacing the Secretary of War, who he disagreed with regarding postwar Reconstruction, without first making sure Congress said it was okay. He escaped conviction by a single vote in the Senate. Nineteen years later the Supreme Court said Johnson’s impeachment was unconstitutional, having been more politically motivated, and changed the rules so impeachment had to be more about “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In 1998 Bill Clinton was impeached not for getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky, but for lying about that bit of fellatio; the articles of impeachment were for perjury and obstruction of justice. He got off too, pun intended. The Senate decided that while he’d been a bad boy, his crimes weren’t at the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Then, on December 18, 2019, Orange Julius Seize Her became IMPOTUS the Third when the House voted to impeach the motherfucker. The official charges were abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. This stemmed from a phone call with the President of Ukraine in which Trump withheld approved military aid to Ukraine in order to coerce that country’s leader into investigating Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. In short, Trump used the office of the president to pressure a foreign power to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election so he could win it. And then he interfered with Congress trying to investigate his crime. Fuck. That. Guy.

The trial was a sham that suppressed a shit-ton of evidence. A depressing wow-the-senate-is-fucking-broken fact about the vote: The 48 Democrat Senators who voted to convict Trump represent 18 million more voters than the 52 who let him go on with being the worst fucking president in U.S. history.

Thirteen months later Trump became the only president to be impeached twice, this time for incitement of insurrection. And once again not enough Republican senators found their spine for the required two-thirds vote to convict the motherfucker.

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