> Honest question, you don't see a danger to our system of checks and balances if the executive gets to block impeachment investigations?
No, because its pretty clear that there is no system of checks and balances curbing executive abuse except when the systematic overrepresentation designed into the Constitution fails, barring the rare and unstable condition of a partisan disalignment (which has happened only a handful of times in US history), because the systematic factional overrepresentation in the Senate and in the Electoral College are aligned (and the overrepresentation is stronger in the Senate than the Electoral College.)
There would only be a system of checks and balances for executive abuse if the decisive actor in removal were the House rather than the Senate.
Absolutely ludicrous. The House and the Senate are both part of the legislative branch. If the legislative branch doesn't see enough of a problem to unify, and no compelling cases can be pushed through the judicial branch, why should half a branch of government be able to remove the most powerful member of another branch?
Both parties play the electoral college and both the college as well as pandering have existed since before Trump, Obama, Clinton, etc. The Democrats lost to Trump for the same reason Obama beat the Republicans, they didn't play as well as the other team.
Not in the current environment no. Historically impeachment has been an optics move by the opposing party, that held true here. If you can't get the legislative branch to act with unity or get a useful case through the SCOTUS then most likely the stakes aren't actually that high in the immediate present.
On a more basic level, nothing the current POTUS has done to defend himself is something that the legislative branch couldn't take off the table in time. The country isn't burning down, the economy is fine, by any metric of genuine significance this is just an extremely unpopular president (not that I would claim he's trying to be popular).
The problem with the American system is that, short of staging a coup or actually burning the country down, pivoting before problematic people leave is hard. In my opinion this has the benefit that anything that seems like good legislation from the position of the currently weaker party will still seem like good legislation when they become the strong party again.
In terms of consequences I'm more concerned about things like both parties having noticed that executive orders are an easy way to circumvent the legislative process. My hope is that after election season is over, we'll see more challenges to executive orders that will result in firmer precedents for what a POTUS can and cannot do with an executive order.
