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Good or Bad, Impeachments Are Political Rather Than Legal [1]

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Date: 2023-09-16  

I live about a mile from where the Texas Senate voted today not to remove Ken Paxton from office. No surprise there (the surprise was the House vote to impeach him, even though their case was well-founded). But it invites confusion to use legal-system terms to describe the result.

This vote is not an “acquittal” (i.e., “Not guilty”). It just means that most of the GOP-heavy Senate decided that his misdeeds were not enough to justify removing him from office. There wasn’t much defense of the misdeeds themselves, and Paxton may eventually find himself in a real court about them. There the question will be whether he did anything illegal (very likely yes), rather than whether Texans are entitled to elect crooks to office (by tradition, also yes).

This goes the other way, too. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair (which he did), but the Senate fell well short of removing him from office for it. Again, the actual issue was not guilt but whether the actions justified removing an elected official. The 1998 elections showed that most voters agreed with leaving him in office, but no one thought of him as innocent.

The Trump impeachments did involve serious “high crimes” that constituted misuse of office and merited removal, but that failed because (unlike with Nixon) most Republican senators put party before country. But that was a political failure, not a legal decision.

The Biden situation is different because there is no evidently no crime to be found, so if he is impeached the backlash should be even stronger than it was with Clinton. Especially after the accusations are examined in trial-like conditions with cross-examination.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/16/2193762/-Good-or-Bad-Impeachments-Are-Political-Rather-Than-Legal

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