Nixon would have survived Watergate if he had done the same thing Clinton did when he was faced with a constitutional crises.... Flipping the Congress and the Senate the bird. Instead, he saved his party and paved the way for Ronald Reagan and Bush 1 to run the White House for 12 consecutive years.
The fact is this... The president is elected by the people and while the concept of removing him from office is a viable one with impeachment, no sitting President has ever been removed from office via that remedy.
At the end of the day it isn’t practical because a President duly elected by the people through the electoral college system can always say NO.
That is the reason Clinton’s conviction vote in the Senate failed. That and the lack of two thirds majority, but even if there were a two thirds majority the President is the Commander in Chief of one thee largest military’s in
world history. He tells them to jump, and they typical say ‘how high’. When Clinton bombed Iraq on the very same day that the articles of impeachment were voted for in Congress, Clinton was sending the Senate and any political opponents within his own party a very subtle and very important message... Do not screw with me. I am the President.
At the end they didn’t and that is why Clinton was not convicted in the Senate and why there has never ever been a sitting President removed by office via impeachment.
Nixon could easily have done the same as Clinton and said... Screw you. Instead he resigned from office before the Congress could vote for articles of impeachment, because despite the seething hatred and malice Democrats held toward Nixon, he was an intelligent and principled man who understood that a nation embroiled in the travails that the Unites States had gone through over the previous 10 years with the Vietnam war, the assassination of a President, the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy, the alarming rise of militancy, etc. That a country that had gone through all that, didn’t need a constitutional crises to top it all off.
Nixon saved the Republican party and he also likely saved the American political system from itself at the same time with his resignation.
That is a sound, cogent, and historically accurate analysis.
However, I feel we are WAY through the looking glass on this. The Democrat Party has been absolutely overtaken by fringe kooks. Rational analysis is no longer effective in figuring out what they’re likely to do. I have no doubt they’d pull the trigger, just because they can, and they ACTUALLY BELIEVE that Trump is Hitler.
There will be no small number of establishment RINOs willing to join them.