☠️ Politics: Impeachment legal status update

This is about ☠️ politics, sorry. ☹️ 😒 💩

As we all know, House Repubs are gonna impeach Joe Biden for all his high crimes and misdemeanors. Naughty Joe. So far, the impeachment proceedings have been a nothingburger accompanied by lots of allegations, slanders, smoke and mirrors. But now, by golly, the Repubs have their story straight, their ducks in a row and their oars in the water. They're gonna nail naughty Joe. An impeachment legal scholar, Norman Eisen, writing for Salon comments:
House impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden have reached a boil with new subpoenas against his brother James, his son Hunter, and one of Hunter’s business associates. As a scholar and practitioner of impeachment, I believe these subpoenas and the underlying proceedings they reflect are flawed, both legally and factually. If tested in court, the subpoenas will likely be struck down and the impeachment itself is doomed when it reaches the Senate — if it even makes it that far.

The most basic problem with the subpoenas is that you need to have a House vote formally authorizing an impeachment inquiry to issue impeachment-related subpoenas. In the first impeachment of Donald Trump, where I served as special counsel to House Democrats, we went to great lengths to secure such authorization for just that reason. Such a House vote has not happened here, meaning that enforcement of these subpoenas may prove problematic, to say the least.

Indeed, the whole impeachment process is unsound. That is because it does not meet the constitutional standard of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That standard is so strict that when I was representing House Democrats, they initially chose not to impeach the former president, notwithstanding powerful evidence developed by then-special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump had committed 10 possible acts of obstruction of justice. Any other American besides a sitting president would have been indicted on multiple counts for this conduct. Yet despite that, and their political adversity to then-President Trump, House Democrats did not feel the case was strong enough. [Sigh, Dems are worthless . . . . .] It was only when a whistleblower emerged with proof positive that Trump had attempted to bribe the president of Ukraine to attack as leading political opponent with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid that we finally proceeded.  
Compare that with the evidence that Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have been pushing to support impeachment in recent weeks. The latest supposed smoking gun involves two payments James Biden made to his brother, Joe Biden. Republicans and their allies are pointing to this as evidence of a crime that rises to the level of warranting impeachment. The problem? The payments prove no such thing. The investigators surely know it—and yet they seem determined to use the payments to advance their vendetta against President Biden anyway.
Looks like more fresh nothingburgers are on tap from House Repubs. Yabba dabba doo! 🤪 👏


By Germaine: Someone interested in ☠️ politics 

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