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!

Flip This (White) House

the View from the Podium

Flip This (White) House

Today's View from the Podium is inspired by my visit to the White House last Friday.  Julie and I got the last tour before they all got discontinued due to the current round of dick-measuring between Democrats and Republicans called the Great Budget Sequester of 2013 (can't WAIT for Disney/Spielberg to make it into a 3-part movie series directed by Peter Jackson, set in Antarctica or somewhere else on-location in the Antipodes).  I just got to thinking about all the people who lived (and didn't live) in the Executive Mansion, a.k.a. the White House, how they liked it, whether or not they did normal home-owner stuff like cut the grass, order out for Chinese, and the various marks the presidents who lived there made on the stately old residence.

Firstly, you've got to find the actual, physical location of La Casa Blanca.  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, right?

Mitt: How do you get to the White House?
Barack: Yeah, not the way you tried.  Either time.

Weeelllll, not really.  To get to the White House, you've got to take a side-trip to the crypt (nobody's buried there!  True story) in the U.S. Capitol (the building with the big-ass iron dome they were building during that Daniel Day Lewis movie).  On the floor of the Capitol, you will see a fancy star.  This is the point that the architect of the Capitol, Pierre Charles l'Enfant (a.k.a. Baby Peete to his colonial peeps) used as the central radial point for all of Washington's streets, avenues and quadrants.  Essentially, he divided the Federal District into four parts: Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Northwest.  The White House's OFFICIAL address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.  Pennsylvania Avenue cuts through the entire Federal District, so at its other end, in the SE quadrant, is another 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  And what's at THAT address?

I swear to God I am so-not-making-this-up

Yeah, a different global empire that dominates the entire civilized world --only that one's run by some clown named Ronald (hey, so was the other one for part of the 1980's!)

Now that you've found the White House, the next thing you might need to know is how to get in (now WHERE did I leave my house keys...)  Visitors enter on the right side, after going through more security than a guy named Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah al Mutawiawh might be subjected to, trying to get into the National Security Agency on the Prophet's Birthday.  Staffers go in on the left side, after going through slightly less security than our pal Sheikh Ali above.  If you're President Kennedy and you've just had some face-tits-and-ass-time with, oh, I don't know, Marilyn Monroe, you could use a little talked-about secret tunnel. 

I'm not saying this is it --not saying it isn't it, either ;-)

If you're the president/king/Beloved-Leader-For-Life of a foreign country, you get to come in the front door.  But if you're super-uber-important and you've just spent a long weekend chillin' with the current occupant at his little country place, Camp David, and you've got to go back with the POTUS (President of the United States of America) to just jot a few things down with him in his little oval-shaped office, then you get to use the back door.  After getting out of a Marine helicopter.  Which lands on the White House lawn.  Right next to the current White House dog.  What a totally bad-ass way to come home!

"Wil-MA!  I'm home!"

Now that you're in, you had better be able to find your way around and find something useful to do if you want to keep working there.  On one end of the spectrum, we have Calvin Coolidge who liked to go down into the basement and inventory the number of apples on hand.  I'm thinking that there wasn't much to do in the government-department during the Roaring 20's, except perhaps actually doing something proactive to head off the Great Depression.  Then, we have the president who came next and actually got blamed for the Great Depression: Herbert Hoover.  Word has it that Hoover worked 14-16 hours a day, 6 days a week, to try to do something that would actually help the people that American capitalism had chewed up and spit out.  And no, none of the people he tried to help appreciated any of his efforts.  They promptly voted him out of office, and kept voting for the next guy so many times that Congress and the states  passed a Constitutional Amendment to make them stop.

"The only thing we have to fear, is pissed-off Republicans."

So, let's say that you'me managed to find the place and justify your stay there for at least four years.  It's only natural that you'd want to make the place a little more homelike --put your personal stamp on the place.  There have been a lot of former tenants, though not George Washington because the place hadn't been built yet (word has it that they were union carpenters supervised by federal bureaucrats).  The first resident, John Adams, was optimistic about his new digs, writing to his wife, Abigail, he hoped that "none but honest and wise men should ever rule under this roof."  Abigail found the place cold and drafty in the winter, tolerable only if there was a fire burning in every fireplace.  Her personal style-statement was to hang her washing in the East Room.  There is no reliable historical documentation on where she hung her laundry back home in Braintree, Massachusetts.

"Does this king sized sheet make my butt look big?"

You've probably heard that the White House was burned during the War of 1812.  What you may not have heard is that Dolly Madison saved the big portrait of George Washington and the silver plate before the Redcoats sat down to the meal she had originally prepared for Mr. Madison.  Fortunately, the place had a bit of a spruce-up just in time for it to be the scene of the first off-da-hook rave in America.  Yes, Andrew Jackson's election was a complete break from past tradition.  No more staid, boring parties.  Andrew Jackson was a man of the people, all of whom were invited to his first inaugural bash.  So many people crowded into the mansion that Jackson himself had to slip out of a window to avoid being crushed.  The only way to get the crowd out was to jack the booze up on the lawn, which is what some quick thinking White House butler did otherwise the place would have been trashed.

Descendants of Jackson's Inaugural Bender

After the party was over, Jackson became the first president to really take an interest in the building.  He added the iron fences, an orangery, running water, and a Foosball table (ok, not the Foosball table --but he SO would have if it had been invented yet!).  James K. Polk added gas lights and a statue of Jefferson.  A different Abigail, Abigail Fillmore, made the 2nd floor oval room into a library.  Franklin Pierce, from New Hampshire, added central heating --probably because he couldn't take those brutal Washington winter nights of 50 degrees, unlike the tropical  climate of New Hampshire.  

During the Civil War, soldiers were quartered in the East Room.  They were replaced by the body of
President Lincoln after his assassination, a very sad time for the White House.  Better times were to come with the Grants, who undertook extensive renovations of the house and grounds.  The coolest improvement? Rutherford B. Hays and the telephone.  When you called the White House, President Hays answered.  And his phone number? 1.

"Rutherford B. Hays my ass-
 put the President on."

It was the 20th Century presidents who did the most renovations.  The Oval Office, Cabinet Meeting Rooms, the Rose Garden were all added in the early days.  Electricity, more office space, even a pool and bowling alley were added later.  With the Cold War came lead-lined fallout blast bunkers and command-control electronics.  Post-911 additions included SAM-missiles on the roof and lots of secret enhanced security measures.

There are fun additions as well: garden parties, the Easter Egg Roll and the annual pardoning of the White House Turkey just before Thanksgiving.  There are parties for the famous, powerful, and even the needy.  There have been pets, both ordinary and exotic, lots of children, a couple of marriages, and even Amy Carter's tree house.

Oh, and yes, that story of Janis Joplin and Abbie Hoffman being invited to one of Trisha Nixon's tea parties on the White House lawn?  Totally true.  Janice and Tricia attended the same college (though probably weren't sorority sisters), so she got sent an invite.  Her plus-one was the reason they never actually got to attend: he had brought 100 hits of acid with him and was going to dose the punch.  What a psychedelic mess that would have been!

Trisha, you look so --groovy!  Wow...

But the best thing about the White House?  It's your house and my house.  Because, although you and I may not be invited there on a regular or even occasional basis, the White House is the symbol of our great nation.  The house might shelter just one family at a time, but it is the home wherein doth reside the sovereign majesty of the people.  I forget who said that.  It might have been me.  At any rate, do try to visit it the next time you're in DC.  After the Budget Sequester is over.

"Yes, I'm sure Michelle invited us.  Or Sasha.  Or maybe it was Bo.  Joe Biden?"