No kidding. This current situation goes beyond simple policy disagreements, but goes right to the heart of whether the US president is above the law or not. As a consequence, are there any checks on his interference in our elections? How's democracy going to work out if there aren't?
I'd like my kids to grow up in a democracy, and this deterioration is really f'ing stressful.
(If you're one of those "but it's a Republic, not a Democracy!" people - save it)
Take a deep breath. Despite what you may see on TV, it’s not the end of the world.
“whether the US president is above the law or not”
Think of the situation as a poorly defined edge case. The Constitution does not say that laws don’t apply to the president. However, the president has constitutional duties and powers that the other branches have no power to interfere with. So, in some situations the net result may be that the president IS effectively above the law.
But don’t get too upset yet. The real check on power is the ballot box. Presidents only get 4 year terms. And in emergency situations Congress can impeach.
Let the system work itself out, and don’t become overly emotional. It’s not something important like baseball or whether your kid can read, it’s just politics.
Even though you're getting downvoted it's worth expressing this over and over. But we're dealing with an entire cross-cutting section of society that magnifies every problem into a crisis, so it'll almost never be received well.
The constitutional checks and balances are definitely relevant and vital here, but it's worth noting how distorted they've become. Presidential power has been elevated in practice, but it's also been mythologized. Most people have idealized the role beyond it's traditional standing, and this lends itself to degrading the rules and scope of the role itself.
Congress is supposed to be a body of deliberation, but due to party politics has devolved into a purely political sphere of battle. So Congress is complicit with enabling the president to act beyond the circumscribed boundaries that are constitutionally defined.
But the same people complaining about the current abuses were very much complicit with elevating the presidency to demigod status (congress giving up war powers was the most important elevation of presidential power imo).
So how many other corrupt prosecutors did Biden get fired or even investigated if he was so worried about corruption among foreign governments prosecutorial staff? Actually, why was he so worried about it at all? shouldn’t it be Ukraine’s problem to solve? We know how much we didn’t like Russia interfering here
Like I implied above, I don't care about defending Biden.
My point is that the narrative that Biden personally got that particular prosecutor fired is false. Especially if you want to cast the firing as improper.
> Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin [the fired Ukrainian Prosecutor] testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. [1]
> “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified... [2]
Okay, all that's left is establishing that Biden was setting US policy contrary to the views of the rest of the administration (because that's what it would take for his role in it to be improper).
It doesn't make Hunter Biden look very good to be selling his name to foreign entities like that, for sure.
Your position is that Biden, on tape, bragged about getting the investigation cancelled, but he was exaggerating how big his role was, because it was the Obama administration policy to get it cancelled? I find that laughable. It sounds like you're looking for any rationale, no matter how far-fetched, to make Biden not have done what he clearly said he did.
Mind you, I'm a "both/and" kind of guy here. If it was improper for Biden to use the threat of withholding US aid to get the investigation cancelled, it is also improper for Trump to use the threat of withholding US aid to get the investigation restarted.
What I need to see, though, is something on Trump that's closer to what Biden said. Biden outright said he did it. Trump... if you read the transcript through "Trump is a horrible person" glasses, of course he's implying that he'll withhold US aid if Ukraine doesn't do what he wants. If you don't read it that way, though, if you don't assume that's the subtext, it's less clear that he's actually threatening.
He was describing an action he took as the Vice President while in a foreign country. That really doesn't establish his role in setting the policy, as one purpose of the trip would be to deliver the message.
There can certainly be evidence that he argued strongly for the policy, that he delivered the message says very little.
Even if everything were as you say (which I don't believe), it still would speak volumes that nobody saw a problem either with the message being delivered, or with Biden being the one to deliver it. Surely someone in the Obama administration understood the concept of "conflict of interest"... didn't they?
Maybe both of these things are bad if true? It's just that hyper-partisanship and making the senior levels of the justice system into political appointments have made it impossible to hold the powerful to account.
Well I think it’s definitely questionable to go on a fishing expedition without any evidence.
But I don’t think it can be bad to ask someone to investigate if a known extortionate action was undertaken for a corrupt cause when we have direct evidence that there was a large personal financial benefit received.
I fail to see what about my response was what about ism.
The OP asked if the President is above the law. Democrats are currently trying to impeach the President for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. I think we are talking about the exact topic at hand, not some unrelated “what about”.
I'd like my kids to grow up in a democracy, and this deterioration is really f'ing stressful.
(If you're one of those "but it's a Republic, not a Democracy!" people - save it)