That's Just Impeachy

Sure, we all know how we GET a president.  In November, we walk into a little cubicle with a curtain, color in a bubble on a form (a VOTE) and whomever has the most bubbles, erm, votes, wins!  Usually.  Ok, not if you're Al Gore.  Or Hillary Clinton.  See, they flunked out of the Electoral College.  Bet they both wished they had stayed awake in ol' Ex Proff's class, eh?  Then they too might have been president.  But who cares how we get 'em?  The hot topic today is how we GET RID of them.  Hypothetically, what if the man anointed by the Electoral College turns out to have, I don't know, colluded with a foreign power to steal the election through information theft and a massive campaign of propaganda and disinformation.  Let's say further that the "President" then used the office to enrich himself and his family at the expense of the national interest.  Oh, and finally, what if the individual in question is a real douchebag?

The biggest, best, most un-be-lievable douchebag ever seen...

Why, just impeach them, I hear you cry.  Weeelllll, not reeeeeaaaalllllly.  The real answer is that nobody's all that sure, because since our nation's founding, we've never had to get rid of a president before today.  Wait a minute, you say, what about Andrew Johnson?  Richard Nixon?  Bill Clinton?  Weren't they all impeached?  Wrong again.  Only Clinton and Johnson were impeached.  Nixon probably would have been impeached but he resigned first.  Clinton was acquitted, and so was Johnson, though the latter was just one vote short of being convicted.  But all this isn't to say we haven't gotten rid of presidents before.  The only problem is that they've all been assassinated.  And I don't care how big a douchebag anybody is, nobody deserves to be assassinated.  I think.  Unless you're talking about someone who's really, really horrendous -a complete threat to our democratic way of life.  And is a colossal douchebag, a literal douche-pontoon-aircraft carrier.  So, back to our original problem: how do we get rid of Tr-- err, a hypothetical Douche-Bagger-In-Chief?

I think it should start with Impeachment.  That much is certain.  That's how to get rid of recalcitrant executive department officials that won't leave when asked, and Federal judges who would rather take bribes than do their jobs.  Not just anybody can be impeached, however, The Constitution specifies that in order to be impeached, the impeachee must have committed a "high crime or misdemeanor."  What this means is that they had to break a law slightly greater than sidewalk spitting.  Heck, that's easy.  Any crooked cop can plant some pills on an unsuspecting traffic stop and presto, the defendant goes to trial.  However, what the Clinton impeachment shows us is that in order to get rid of the President, you have to have the votes in Congress --a super majority at that.

I was NOT convicted by THAT Congress

So, impeach, then try them by a Congress that will convict them, then,,, then what?  Again, nobody knows for sure because it's never gone this far before.  There are a few very important "what ifs?"  Let's start with this one: what if the President leaves the country for, I'm just spitballing here, Russia and claims that they're the victim of a legislative coup d' etat and they'd really appreciate Russia's help at getting them back in the driver seat over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?  What if a lot of other countries around the world believe it too?  What if the United Nations weighs in, calling the impeachment trial "problematic" or "of suspicious motive?"  Does Congress then defy the world?  What if the convicted president doesn't skip the country; who arrests them?  The Capitol Police?  Supposing they are arrested; where are they held?  Or is it enough that they have been kicked out of being president?  Do we just forget about those high crimes and misdemeanors that cost them the job, or does some attorney general or other indict them in front of a grand jury and then go try them --in which court?  Federal?  The state court where the crime took place?  The Washington DC Municipal Court if it happened in DC?

So many questions... I have the best questions... my questions are spec-tac-u-lar...

Once again, nobody knows.  We'd be making up all this shit as we went along.  That said, there have been judges who have been impeached and subsequently prosecuted for their crimes, so Congress could just copy what happened in those events and apply them to the problem of what to do to a wayward president.  But these questions pale in comparison to the one, big, unstated question:  what the heck do we do if he just won't go?

This is not as far-fetched as it seems.  At the beginning of our republic, John Adams was convinced that Thomas Jefferson was getting ready to unleash the horrors of the French Revolution --complete with guillotines in the public squares --onto the American people following his election in 1800.  There was talk, some of it quite heated and serious, of Adams barricading himself in the White House and summoning the army to arrest Jefferson and his supporters.  Adams took the high road, however, choosing only to leave tacks on all the seats in the East Room and swipe all the soap and monogrammed towels.  Jefferson did the same to Madison, by the way.

I also left all the chamber pots full.  Of poop.  Haha!

What I'm getting at here is the very real possibility that an impeached president just may try to brass-balls-it-out and go on national TV or, let's just see here, Twitter, and complain that it's all the result of a Deep State Conspiracy against him, engineered by Obama, with the collusion of the Fake News industry, and all True Americans need to help their legally elected president by taking their constitutionally protected guns and hurrying to Washington.  If this happens, about half of those NRA KKK MAGA* dipshits would head for Washington state and get arrested by a bunch of Washington State Police, but the other half would spread murder and mayhem all over the country until downtown Sheboygan resembled the Kabul Green Zone.  While they were doing that, their political allies and apologists would do everything in their power to aid and abet them from the sidelines, until the country settles down into a comfortable civil war.  And let's remember how much fun the LAST one was: 650,000 soldiers dead, famine, disease, social upheaval and foreign meddlers on the doorstep just itching to step in and carve the United States up into spheres of economic and political influence.  Planet Earth will then be lead by another power (China probably), while the United States enters a period of cultural, economic and social decline, from which it may take centuries to recover.

*National Riflemen's Association, Ku Klux Klan, and Make America Great Again

Introducing North America's next great Superpower...

But let's not let a little thing like uncertainty stop us from doing what needs to be done.  If a president acquires the office through the collusion of a foreign power, they must be removed.  If they use the office for their private enrichment and their family's gain, they must be removed.  If they are too dumb to do the job or too lazy, then they should resign.  Either way, Donald Trump should resign or else be impeached.  But that doesn't stop the problem that created Donald Trump.   If they want to hold onto their jobs, Democrats and Republicans need to see to the good of the American voter who voted for Trump.  Some meaningful constraints must be placed on the real fake news, ie., Breitbart, Fox and the dark, racist corners of the web, in order to silence the lunatic fringe's propaganda machine.  And finally, American politics needs to purge itself of rancour and ideology and raise high the moral standard of public service.  The American Presidency is not a prize to be fought over by billionaires.

I WON'T live in the White House, Mummy!  It's to old and small
and there are NO gold toilet seats!