Sunday December 8, 2019
Sean Colarossi
The Los Angeles Times, the third most circulated newspaper in the United States, dropped an editorial bomb on Donald Trump on Saturday, calling for the president’s impeachment and urging Republicans to join in the effort.
In the piece, entitled ‘We’ve seen enough. Trump should be impeached’, the LA Times editorial board writes that they were a “reluctant convert to the impeachment cause,” but that they were given no choice when examining “the overwhelming evidence that Trump perverted U.S. foreign policy for his own political gain.”
More from the stinging LA Times impeachment endorsement:
The House of Representatives’ inquiry into President Trump’s actions on Ukraine is not yet complete, but the evidence produced over the last two months is more than sufficient to persuade us that he should be impeached. Witness after witness testified that the president held up desperately needed, congressionally approved aid to Ukraine to extort a personal political favor for himself. In so doing, Trump flagrantly abused the power of his office.
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Holding the president accountable for gross abuse of power is the business of Congress. The House should get on with that business by writing articles of impeachment that make it clear to the Senate — and the American people — why the extraordinary remedy of impeachment is necessary. And Republicans who complain that the process is partisan could easily rectify that situation by abandoning their lockstep loyalty to Trump and looking at the facts
Republicans, not Democrats, are turning impeachment into a partisan farce
One of the main Republican impeachment arguments is that the process shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s simply a partisan exercise led by the Democrats to go after Donald Trump.
In one way, Republicans are correct: The impeachment process has turned into a partisan farce. But the reason why, as the LA Times editorial board noted on Saturday, is that GOP lawmakers have refused to look at the evidence.
House Democrats, meanwhile, have compiled and presented damning evidence to justify their push to draft impeachment articles and move toward a formal vote.
The American people, too, recognize the gravity of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, with 70 percent calling the president’s conduct “wrong.”
At the end of the day, Republicans are alone in their belief that Trump did nothing wrong and shouldn’t be held accountable for his proven high crimes and misdemeanors