Continuing with the impeachment of President Trump after he becomes a private citizen sets a very bad precedent. It might open up all kinds of avenues directly to the banana republic that we hope not to become. I’m not a lawyer, or a constitutional scholar, but Article 1, Section 3 contains the following:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The phrase “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor” is what concerns me here. It looks like the first “and” in that sentence requires a person to be in office, but ignore that and all kinds of things are possible. Senator Hirono let the cat out of the bag yesterday.

During Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Cross Connection,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued Congress should attempt to multitask with former President Donald Trump’s impeachment and pass COVID-19 relief.

According to Hirono, the aim of impeachment was to hold Trump accountable for the “violent insurrection” and prevent him from running for office again.

If the reason is to stop President Trump from running for office again, what is to stop them from doing this preemptively?  There may be a ton of legal reasons that it wouldn’t be possible, but I think we are past reasonable legal arguments already.

This would put us right on par with other bastions of democracy like Venezuela.  President Maduro has no issues with arresting the opposition.

Venezuela’s top court issued an arrest warrant Thursday for Leopoldo López, a prominent opposition figure who appeared at a key rally Tuesday next to Juan Guaidó, leader of the movement against President Nicolás Maduro.

There have also been other ideas here in the US to keep the opposition out of power. Arguments to pack the supreme court have been bubbling up. Why not, Venezuela is a blueprint for that as well.

When the late Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez first won the election in 1999, the country’s Supreme Court was independent. But after it issued several rulings that went against him and his administration, Chavez packed the court by passing a law expanding its size from 20 to 32 justices in 2004. Chavez got to pick the 12 new judges — effectively stacking it in his favor.

Canova, who compiled research on 45,000 rulings issued by Venezuela’s high court since 2004, says the court never sided against Chavez’s government after it was packed.

“Since 2004, I found that Chavez and the government never lost a case. Not a single one,” he said.

A lot of these regimes hold on to power because they cover themselves with a thin veneer of legitimacy by claiming what they do is legal. If what is happening isn’t necessarily in accordance with the law, just change it. If all of this is done incrementally enough, you know about the frog and the hot water.