What do you think of censuring trump in lieu of impeaching?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/barring-impeachment-democrats-could-still-censure-trump.html
There is one alternative approach that is quicker and simpler than impeachment, and doesn’t necessarily require any cooperation from the Senate. Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty endorsed it in the wake of the Mueller release, while noting its shortcomings:
There is another option: Either house, could, with a majority vote, formally censure Trump,
something that has not happened to any chief executive since the Senate censured Andrew Jackson in 1834. (trump would Hate!)
While this would be dismissed in some quarters as merely a symbolic act, it would be a historic rebuke of the Trump presidency — and would, properly, leave it to the voters to decide whether they have had enough of it.
Unlike impeachment, a presidential censure has no specific constitutional authorization. Censure has been more customarily meted out by Congress to its own members (most famously Joe McCarthy in 1954) as a disciplinary measure short of the constitutionally sanctioned remedy of expulsion. As Tumulty noted, the Senate (controlled by the opposition Whigs) censured Jackson during a dispute over the Bank of the United States, but Democrats had the measure expunged from the record when they regained control of the chamber. Censure resolutions have been introduced but not enacted during multiple presidencies. Indeed, Trump’s behavior has already inspired the introduction of two House resolutions (one for his comments after the white-nationalist riot in Charlottesville, and another after his racist reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”).
The most relevant recent precedent, however, is almost certainly the effort by Democrats (encouraged by the White House) to censure Bill Clinton instead of impeaching him; Republicans defeated measures in both chambers (one in the House Judiciary Committee and the other on the Senate floor) to substitute censure for action on impeachment. In the hypothetical scenario Tumulty lays out, the shoe would be on the other foot with Democrats proposing to censure Trump, with or without any Republican cooperation.
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