Op-Ed by Bill Weld on drumpf

By BILL WELD |Bill Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, is a Republican candidate for president.


PUBLISHED: November 7, 2019 in the Boston Herald
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/11/07/bill-weld-ive-seen-enough-time-for-trump-to-go/


The recent actions of Republican Party officials in several states to cancel presidential primaries, organized and directed by the Trump organization in Washington, D.C., are not merely anti-democracy: they amount to an organized insurrection against our democratic elections and our Constitution that protects them.

It appears that the U.S. House of Representatives, exercising the sole power of impeachment under the Constitution, may send formal Articles of Impeachment against Donald Trump to the U.S. Senate, which has the duty under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump is to be removed from office.

If Republican Senators walk the plank for Donald Trump, they will deserve all the thanks they get from Mr. Trump in return.

Of course there will be no thanks whatever from a troubled egomaniac, but instead a harsh verdict from history.

Republicans will lose control of the Senate in a landslide similar to that which followed the removal of Richard Nixon from office, and the Republican Party as we have known it will cease to exist.

Impeachment and removal from office is a process that was enshrined in the Constitution. Article II, Section 4 was adopted not to undo elections, but to provide Congress, as our representatives, a way to protect the people in the event that a president’s abuses of power are so great as to threaten our democratic institutions, such as a free press, or our system of government.

In 1973, during Watergate, as a counsel for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, I was among a team of attorneys tasked with preparing a report for the Committee on the Constitutional Grounds for Impeachment. That report remains today as a foundational reference for those in Congress contemplating the impeachment and removal of Donald J. Trump.

Our president’s actions don’t just  “fit” within what we found to be grounds for impeachment and removal: rather, they are precisely what the Founders feared.

The top two concerns of the Founders were that a President might invite foreign interference in our internal affairs, and that a President might corrupt his public office by abusing it to seek personal gain for himself, whether financial, political or legal.

Mr. Trump’s actions check all the boxes.

He used hundreds of millions of dollars in critical military aid to a key European ally, fighting a hot war with Russia, to bully the president of Ukraine into digging up dirt on a political opponent. This time, he didn’t just tolerate foreign interference in our elections, he engaged in extortion to try to make it happen.

People in the Ukraine died and the national security of the United States was compromised because Donald Trump put a price on crucial assistance to an ally, and that price was entirely about insuring his own re-election — failing which, he has openly threatened Civil War!

A president abusing his power to insure his hold on that power — and enlisting a foreign nation to do so — is exactly what the Founders feared when they gave Congress the power to impeach and remove a president.

I’ve seen enough. If I were in the Senate today, I would vote to remove Donald J. Trump from office.

They say I am a dark horse as a candidate in this year’s presidential race. Who is darker, a proven economic conservative who takes environmental threats and military alliances seriously, or a man who sells out his own country for personal gain?

Donald Trump is a man who has his sycophants cancel American elections because he believes democracy must be dodged at all costs, so that later it can be abandoned.

These are ominous days for our Republic, and a weighty burden is soon to descend on the Republican members of the United States Senate.  I pray they may shoulder it.