Impeach Trump Update: Dems Exploring This Secret Loophole To Remove President From Office
For Democrats, if there’s a will, there’s a way to impeach Donald Trump.
Reportedly, an unremitting critic of the president who raised the possibility of Trump’s impeachment in the past, is secretly consulting with psychologists about the status of the POTUS’ mental health. As an alternative, Democrats are focused on using a provision in the U.S. Constitution to remove, rather than impeach, President Trump from office on the grounds of his lack of fitness to discharge the duties as head of the Executive Branch.
As infighting slowly grows among Republican lawmakers and Donald Trump, California Democratic Representative Jackie Speier is partnering with “Duty to Warn,” a political action committee (or PAC) to assess Trump’s mental health and provisions that will call for his legal removal. Rep. Speier is consulting with John Gartner, an ex-Johns Hopkins Medical School assistant professor, according to Newsweek.
An effort to impeach Donald Trump is a challenge among detractors of the president’s “divisive” rhetoric and “bullying” leadership style. Currently, Democrats lack the support of Republican lawmakers who control all branches of government under Trump.
Speier acknowledges that she lacks the credentials to deem the president mentally unfit to serve or even if he suffers from any form of psychosis. Therefore, she reasoned her efforts were best served by obtaining a professional consult on the president’s mental health.
The veteran Democrat is leaning on the 25th Amendment that gives the vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet the authority to declare Trump unsuitable to discharge his duties. In August, she tweeted her concerns about Donald Trump’s “mental instability” that she believes places the country in “grave danger” and chaos.
“It’s one thing from my non-professional, non-clinical standpoint [to] believe that someone does not have the capacity to do the job, it’s another thing to talk to experts and [those] who can deal with mental psychosis on a daily basis, so I wanted to hear from them.”
Other Democrats expressed similar feelings of removing Trump in lieu of impeachment. Six Democratic members of Congress reached out to Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, to debate Trump’s mental status and fitness for office. Lee’s recent book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump highlights over two-dozen mental health specialists opining over the president’s rational state.
A group of experts wrote a book about Donald Trump’s mental health—and the controversy has just begun https://t.co/2HtrLiHg6m pic.twitter.com/PMtN2Ftoqy
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 25, 2017
Critics of this approach invoke the “Goldwater Rule,” so named after Senator Barry Goldwater, who ran unsuccessfully against the presidential incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. The rule was created after the American Psychiatric Association learned that some of its members referred to the senator publicly as “schizophrenic,” “paranoid,” and the like, according to Psychology Today.
Democrats who support moves to impeach Donald Trump contend that the rule is usurped by their “moral and civic duty to warn” the public about Trump, whom they believe is a “dangerous madman.”
In his book, Gartner is highly critical of the controversial president. “Trump is a profoundly evil man exhibiting malignant narcissism,” he writes. “History will not be kind to a profession that aided the rise of an American Hitler through its silence,” he adds.
So far, the assembly of psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals has not formally diagnosed Trump. Still, Democrats are focused on efforts to impeach the president.
[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
