Donald Trump's impeachment blows up the Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter
The Impeach-O-Meter is gone, but the impeachment drama continues
Impeachment is an extraordinarly rare thing in United States history but Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter alumni Dahlia Lithwick and Jeet Heer say President Donald Trump's impeachment was ultimately inevitable.
"He hasn't done anything to avoid impeachment," Heer, the national affairs correspondent at The Nation, told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.
"The Democrats were very reluctant to impeach … but he still pushed very cautious people to the limits."
On Wednesday the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction.
It is just the third time in U.S. history that a sitting president has been impeached.
The impeachment stems from a July phone call in which Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election, allegedly in exchange for signing off on military aid.
This is not the first time Trump has been accused of co-ordinating with a foreign country to influence an election, Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick says.
"This is exactly what the entire Mueller probe was about," she told Day 6.
Lithwick says that made it all the more important for the Democrats to take a stand ahead of the next election.
"In some sense I think Ukraine becomes an easy way of saying: he did it again," she said.
Impeach-O-Meter is no more
It also means that the Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter, which has been tracking the president's chance of impeachment by the House since May 2017, is obsolete.
The next step is for Trump to face a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, where it's likely he will be acquitted, allowing him to remain in office.
Heer puts the chance of Trump being removed from office at less than one per cent, while Lithwick puts the odds at two per cent after an Evangelical Christian magazine called for the president's ousting.
"I think that that is a signal that there is an off ramp for people who are looking for an off-ramp," she said.
Click 'listen' near the top of this page to hear the full conversation.