Why Congress Might Impeach Trump and Actually Remove Him From Office
How the big one could go down
By Jonathan Chait
If you have seen the 1995 movie Casino, the fate of Joe Pesci’s character gives a fairly good sense of how Donald Trump might eventually be impeached and removed from office. If you haven’t seen Casino, Pesci’s character, Nicky Santoro, is basically the same as his GoodFellas character: a mobster so violent and erratic he scares the other mobsters. Throughout the film, the narrator tells us that the Mafia bosses disapprove of Santoro’s out-of-control behavior but let him operate anyway because he keeps sending suitcases full of cash back home every month. Their tolerance appears to be infinite, until eventually they reach a breaking point and bury him in a cornfield.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, I’ve dismissed the possibility that he could be removed from office. In all likelihood, the Senate will come nowhere close to mustering the 67 votes needed to do so. But over the past few weeks, the outline of a removal scenario has begun to take shape. The prospect is no longer a fantasy.
The Republican Establishment has largely submitted to Trump, and its acquiescence has come to seem like an immutable fact of this partisan age. But the alliance between Trump and the Republican Congress has…
