[trashtester]

In most cases, I would think the SCOTUS would point to Congress in a situation like this.

It's Congress' role to step up and provide checks and balances for a president that goes off the rails.

As long as a president has support by their fellow party members in congress to be immune against impeachment, I doubt the SCOTUS would step in.

Unless, perhaps, the actions of the president were to be bad enough to introduce imminent risk to the whole system of government. Like pardoning people who (provably) organize large scale voting fraud, etc.

[johnnyanmac]

SCOTUS can't impreach, but they can make sure the next BS pardon is illegal to do. They can re-interpret the law to limit pardons and deny future ones. That's the extent of their power.

But yes, it's up to congress to actual impreach/convict. The SCOTUS can just keep slapping the president if he keeps overstepping his bounds.

>Unless, perhaps, the actions of the president were to be bad enough to introduce imminent risk to the whole system of government. Like pardoning people who (provably) organize large scale voting fraud, etc.

it would be a very interesting, constitutional crisis. I'm not sure if it has anything built in for that. Even Watergate was simply going to go through the impeachment process before Nixon stepped down.

[trashtester]

During Watergate, congress was still aware of it's role as a counterweight to the executive. Nixon would likely have been convicted if he hadn't resigned first, or at least he must have thought so, since he resigned.

But since then, congress has become more and more partisan, with less and less ability to act together in important issues. This was particularily obvious in all 3 impeachment processes that have happened since. In all 3 cases, impeachment was done without the proper bipartisan basis needed for a conviction, basically just to achieve short term political gain.

Like the boy who cried wolf, each repitition means the probability that people will take it seriously next time goes down.

And when the day comes where a president does something that really requires a bi-partisan conviction during an impeachment, congress may be so used to voting along party lines that this becomes impossible.

And maybe worse: presidents may even begin to consider such a conviction an impossibility, and act with fewer inhibitions.