Trump's Ludicrous Claim That Impeachment is Unconstitutional

At times it seems there is no limit to the lies and disinformation that Trump's cult followers and much of the GOP base will willingly swallow.  Just as they reject modern knowledge on a range of issues that varies from climate change to the immutability of sexual orientation, so too, they reject even a semblance of a knowledge of accurate history.  How else to explain their embrace of Trump's claim that impeachment is "unconstitutional" despite the fact that it derives directly from the provisions of the U. S. Constitution. As a column in the New York Times lays out, the same falsity applies to Trump's claim that his impeachment and removal from office would "reverse the 2016 election."  If Trump is removed, Mike Pence, a Republican, would rise to the office of president - unless, of course, Pence is shown to have engaged in "high crimes and misdemeanors" like Trump. The column looks at how we got to today's presidential elections and the dishonesty of Trump's claims - ditto for his bootlickers like Lindsey Graham. Here are column excerpts:

As House Democrats ramp up their impeachment investigation into President Trump, an increasingly vocal charge from the president’s supporters (and the White House) is that the House is attempting to “overturn” the results of the 2016 election.

The charge is that impeaching and removing an elected president is illegitimate because it is anti-democratic — because the person the voters (or, at least in this case, the Electoral College) chose ends up out of office. This argument is silly — impeachment is in the Constitution as a way of dealing with the abuse of executive power.

But to fully understand why the charge is ludicrous, it may help to go back 219 years — to the origins of a constitutional provision that receives virtually no attention in contemporary discourse, the 12th Amendment.

Congress responded with the 12th Amendment, proposed in December 1803 and ratified by the states, by the standards of constitutional amendments, practically overnight. That provision gave us the presidential elections we have today, in which electors cast one vote apiece for president and vice president. And so long as the current two-party system prevails, the 12th Amendment thereby all but guarantees that an elected vice president will be, if not from the same party as the elected president, at least the nominee of the same party.

[E]ven if the House ultimately impeaches Mr. Trump and the Senate removes him, the result would simply be to elevate to the presidency Mr. Trump’s own handpicked running mate, Vice President Mike Pence — who could then nominate his own vice president under the 25th Amendment.

Against that backdrop, it’s difficult to see how removing Mr. Trump would “overturn” the results of the election, since the same party that won would remain in control of the White House. But there’s a deeper and more important point here: The founders wrote the impeachment and removal power into the Constitution at a time when that wasn’t true — when there was no 12th Amendment, and so it was entirely possible that removing the president from office would hand power over to one of his rivals.

That’s exactly what would have happened, for instance, if the Democratic-Republicans had taken over Congress in the 1798 midterm elections instead of in 1800, and then removed Adams in favor of Jefferson. But even in the face of that possibility, the founders still gave the House the power to impeach and the Senate the power to remove — because it was more important that the legislature should have a check on the executive.

Checks and balances run in both directions. To that end, the Constitution’s drafters took away the vice president’s power to preside over presidential removal trials in the Senate (and gave it to the chief justice). And although a bare majority of the House has the power to impeach, the founders required a two-thirds vote of the Senate for removal — to ensure that a geographically representative supermajority agreed with the House’s determination that the president had engaged in misconduct that should disqualify him from office.

This is why impeachment and removal remain extraordinary remedies for extraordinary misconduct by the president of the United States. But the founders would have been appalled at the suggestion that such measures are illegitimate solely because their result would be that the president is no longer the president. If that didn’t faze them even when the result could have been to hand the presidency to the president’s rival, it certainly wouldn’t faze them today, when it would hand the presidency to the president’s own handpicked running mate.

Just as science is the enemy of today's GOP base, so too is an accurate knowledge of history and the nation's founding documents.  This deliberate embrace of ignorance sets the state for demagogues and would be authoritarians.