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The long, drawn-out impeachment investigation we are totally consumed with is a dispensable drama with an uncertain conclusion. The House committee is attempting to prove by numerous testimony that a criminal act against the constitution has been committed by the president. The legal basis for impeachment is defined in Article ll, Section 4 as acts of Treason, Bribery, High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
According to the on-going proceedings, the committee is focusing mainly on Trump's phone call to the president of the Ukraine in which he made military aid authorized by congress subject to Ukraine's digging up dirt on the Bidens for his personal political purposes. Whether this "quid-pro-quo" that has been fairly well corroborated by recent testimony is in the category of bribery or high crimes, I am not qualified to clarify. An act is legally criminal only if it can be judged as violating established law. In the impeachment process, no court of justice establishes the guilt - only a partisan political process. Many sins can escape punishment.
If we examine Trump's actions since coming into office from the standpoint of "misdemeanors", we will realize that there are more obvious, uncontroversial reasons for impeachment on an expedited basis. A standard dictionary definition of "misdemeanors" is "wrongdoing, evil deed, crime, felony; misdeed, misconduct, offense, error, peccadillo, transgression, sin". Except for "crime' and felony", which are legal concepts, almost every act of Trump since taking office will fall into the other categories of "misdemeanors".
I will not take the time to enumerate them, but if, for example, we define the president's lying to the public as "wrongdoing" or an "evil deed," thousands of evil deeds or wrongdoings have been counted. For the purposes of impeachment, we need focus on only one wrongdoing of monumental proportions.
The UN has released a new "Emissions Gap Report" on global warming more alarming than previous reports. It states that to avoid the unimaginable consequences of global warming, the world must reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by 7.6% annually in the next decade. Despite pledges by 200 nations at the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, CO2 has been increasing by 1.5% annually since then.
Our country is a world leader in carbon emissions and is on course to withdraw from the Paris Accord, whereas we should be leading the world in environmental restoration. Our president has called global warming a hoax. On his path of undermining civilization and life on Earth, he is actively promoting the fossil fuel industries and undoing the previous gains of environmental protection. This "wrongdoing" alone is cause for his immediate removal from the halls of government along with his avid co-conspirators who support the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. We should not tolerate them for one more day.
The outcome should not depend upon a lengthy and dubious impeachment process by an unreliable congress or, possibly, a prejudicially selected court. If our military and law enforcement establishments exist to protect the people of our nation, they should be faithful to their constitutional purpose as their fundamental duty and, in the spirit of the Declaration of independence, side with "We the People" who are clamoring for environmental protection, rather than support our malignant administration of the corporate elite and obey their demented commander-in-chief.
