monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

protective illusions
fatuous
trumped up charges
lies and deceptions
ridiculous spectacle
circus
indicators of serious corruption
hard-to-love shrill Cherokee
loonies
Democrat hysteria

In any event unfolding events will reveal the truth.

Did McCain and Clinton break the same laws shopping for the Steele dossier?

When we find out that they've been colluding with a foreign power. Next?

I wrote "successful impeachment" explicitly to mean conviction.

Washington's growing antitrust war against Silicon Valley is opening a rift among Republicans — with the Koch family’s vast political operation and other small-government groups emerging as the tech industry’s key allies on the issue.

The split is starkest between free-market conservatives who view the mushrooming antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook and Amazon as government intrusions into private enterprise, and GOP lawmakers and regulators who believe the companies themselves now pose a threat to market competition, privacy and free speech. That latter group has found a rare piece of common ground with Democrats, who are broadly and increasingly calling for tougher Silicon Valley regulations.

The most visible sign of the divide came last month when Americans for Prosperity, the political organization founded by conservative mega-donors Charles and the late David Koch, launched a Facebook ad campaign targeting nine Republican and Democratic state attorneys general who are leading antitrust investigations of Google and Facebook. The ads direct voters to submit form letters urging the AGs to avoid creating a "political spectacle" and arguing that "punishing companies for size or success would mean risking the jobs of countless Americans."...

georgeob1 wrote:

I wrote "successful impeachment" explicitly to mean conviction.

A guarantee of successful conviction is not the necessary precursor to an impeachment investigation or trial. And obviously ought not to be.

Congress has a constitutional duty to address potentially impeachable offenses.

Quote:

Congress has a constitutional duty to address potentially impeachable offenses.

Of course it does. To refrain from doing so is not merely a moral and constitutional failure, it can only reaffirm in citizens' minds that the American political system has no rationale and no function other than continuation of corrupt centers of power.

Efforts to impeach Barack Obama
During Barack Obama's tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich,[1] stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office.[2] Rationales offered for possible impeachment included false claims[3] that Obama was born outside the United States, that he allegedly allowed people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, an alleged White House cover-up after the 2012 Benghazi attack, and failure to enforce immigration laws. No list of articles of impeachment was ever drawn up and proposed to the Judiciary Committee.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that the clear majority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, while a majority of Republicans were in favor; for example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported these efforts while about two thirds of adult Americans in general disagreed with them.[4]