The Articles of Impeachment Should Have Been These Instead | Ted Rall's Rallblog

The Articles of Impeachment Should Have Been These Instead | Ted Rall's Rallblog: Donald Trump deserved to be impeached. He deserves to be convicted in the Senate. Every president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors that could justify impeachment. But not on these charges. Not for threatening to withhold $400 million in aid that we shouldn't have been sending to Ukraine in the first place, not as long as 38 million Americans are poor. Not for trying to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden; American voters have the right to know that the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and his son are on the take. Certainly not on the nonsensical count of contempt of Congress, which punished the president for the crime of using the legal system to defend himself. Impeachment is a political process that only has legitimacy when it's bipartisan. In 1974 Democrats drafted wide-ranging articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. They appealed to constituencies across a wide spectrum of interests: corruption, financial fraud, bribing witnesses not to testify, privacy violations, opposition to the Vietnam War. The Nixon articles were crafted in order to attract support from Republicans. The media claims that the GOP has never been in thrall to a p