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Comment by lunarboy | Hacker News Reader

Surely the "impeachment exists" arguments are in bad faith. Otherwise, I'm convinced they've abandoned reason.

Impeachment process takes time, and in that window, the president can do whatever. POTUS can even mobilize the army (an official power) to block congress from meeting, since apparently the motive behind the use of official power doesn't matter. If they can't meet, how are they going to impeach.

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Of course they're in bad faith. The whole idea is to punt accountability off to something else endlessly. "We can't do X because Y already exists to handle that." Later: "We can't do Y because we already have Z." And thus: "X is the proper way to handle that, not Z."

Precisely. One must understand that the more safeguards we have to enact retribution in these cases, the better. You're not supposed to point to one avenue after loss of another - you're supposed to point towards as many as possible. Before today, the courts were the one we pointed to the most, and they are no longer nearly as much at our disposal as they were before this morning.

If a president is illegally mobilizing an army I'm not sure how this ruling would change anything? Do you think congress would be slower than courts to work this out? If a president was stopping congress from meeting then they could stop courts from meeting as well. Or he could just ignore the courts if it had really gotten that bad...

Impeachments take time because the impeachments we’ve had so far have tended to be political theater. I have no doubt that if there was a bi-partisan super-majority wanting to remove the president, they’d hop on a Zoom call and have it done by the close of business.

Edit: My example was going to be if the President addressed the nation and declared himself to be king… but Biden literally just did that, reluctantly accepting that he was beyond the review of the courts and accountable to no one but himself.

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