Of course, specific, egregious crimes or corruption may be important factors in the process. Sure, impeachment can be used just to remove a particular person who has murdered someone in his kitchen or taken a bribe outside of the oligarchy's managed festival of "unlimited political bribery." But the strong point of impeachment is not to just change a face; it is to change the political leadership in order to change the political project it drives.
Not only will replacing Donald Trump with Mike Pence not improve the political leadership or political project it drives, but the process of impeachment that will be carried out "in this given moment" by the Democratic party and its allied media, whether it succeeds or fails, will itself worsen the politics of the country.
That's because the Democrats will not pursue impeachment in order to change the political project that Trump and Pence and the reactionary Republican and Democratic establishments impose on the county. It won't be seeking to remove Trump because of his criminal and dangerous aggressions against Syria, Venezuela, and Iran; or because of his arming of actual Nazi fascists in Ukraine; or because he has abrogated even the semblance of concern for international law and justice by accepting Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the Golan Heights as Israel's territory and the sniper killing of hundreds of civilian protestors as Israel's prerogative; or because he is exacerbating inequality and the social immiseration of American workers with tax cuts for the rich and offensives against social programs; or because his administration threatens freedom of speech and the press through the prosecution of Julian Assange; or even because of the structural, programmatic racism he oversees though racialized policing, mass incarceration, and immigration policies.
At best, a very few of these things will be mentioned in fervent speeches, based in the politics of nasty-vs-nice (which is to say, no politics at all), that renounce the nasty and racist things Trump says about Jake Tapper and Mexicans and Baltimore. There will be many elaborations on Lindsey Graham's perfect description of Trump as "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot." These will all be expressions of the personalized disgust of the man and his repellent attitudes, which, per Lindsey, were obvious to everyone when he was elected. (And not by "the American people," but by the Electoral College. The "American people" rejected him by three million votes, as we'd all have been saying for the past three years if the Electoral College did not exist.)
But the Democrats' official impeachment process, for the record, will not be defined as removing a president because he's a racist, xenophobe, or religious bigot--characteristics that would retroactively diss and disqualify virtually all previous presidents and, uh, Mike Pence, the president they would be replacing him with.
No, the Democrats' impeachment will be based on using and extending the reactionary and diversionary framing the Democrats have been using for the Russiagate fraud for the past two-and-a-half years. It will center Donald Trump and Russia with him as the evil villain who helped the evil foreign power "attack our democracy." It will aggressively reinforce, as a reason to overturn an election, the hypocritical, war-mongering, nouveau-McCarthyite, and fraudulent narrative--a narrative that's been used to dismiss left critiques, to promote worship of the most repressive and mendacious state agencies, and to implicitly posit an idyllic ante-Trump America that will be restored with his removal, while disappearing the failures of the Democratic policies and politicians that made Trump's election possible.
The idea that the Democrats can create a political tide that Republican senators cannot resist, by proving "obstruction of justice" legally and cleanly as the impeachable "high crime" in its own right, regardless of whether there actually was any "Russian collusion," is another awkward delusion that no one really believes.
First of all, the criminal charge of "obstruction of justice" is not proven, or even made, in the Mueller Report, and, despite all the ticked boxes the Democrats produce, the legal issues involved in it are more complicated than they suggest. In or out of office, Donald Trump will not be convicted or even charged with obstruction of justice. And the Democrats know this.
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