There are multiple reasons why Donald Trump ought not to be the president of the United States. However, there are only two ways of removing him from the office he has occupied for the past three years. One is to vote him out at the ballot box, which Americans will have the opportunity to do in a year’s time. The other is for Congress to impeach him, a process that began on Capitol Hill in September, and which went into public session on Wednesday, when the first hearings were beamed around the US and the world.
Although much of Washington has talked of little else for weeks, the public hearings before the Democrat-controlled House intelligence committee sharply raise the visibility of the impeachment effort with the wider public. Presidential impeachment is rare and grave. This is only the fourth time it has happened in American history. But impeachment is also both a quasi-judicial process and an inescapably political one, as anyone who remembers the 1999 trial of Bill Clinton will understand. » | Editorial | Thursday, November 14, 2019
