Betsy's right: High crimes and misdemeanors means offenses committed while in high office

It's not the severity of the crime which makes it high, but it damn well better be a crime. Democrats haven't been able to come up with one despite turning themselves and the country into pretzels.

And Trump's tax returns from the past and his dalliances from the past and why he named his son "Barron" are all completely irrelevant, as is everything else he's done while not in office. Those things matter only at election time.

Here's Betsy:

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the framers considered grounds for impeachment. On Sept. 8, George Mason suggested that bribery and treason were too narrow, and proposed adding "maladministration." But James Madison objected, explaining that "so vague a term will be equivalent to" saying the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress. The framers did not want to duplicate the British system, which made the executive dependent on Parliament. Mason's idea was dropped, and the framers instead agreed to the more specific term, "high crimes and misdemeanors," where "high" meant offenses committed while in high office, such as embezzling public funds.

WaPo Finally Demotes The Leader Of The Banana Republic To Lecturer

When you lose The Washington Post, you've really lost it.

The comment at the left was seen here in the comments section to an article in The Washington Post which, among other things, omits Obama's use of the term "Banana Republic" in his address in Kansas today, but does finally demote him to the mere lecturer that he was at the University of Chicago:

Obama at times sought to belittle GOP lawmakers. “The most basic constitutional duty Congress has is to pass a budget,” said the president, a former constitutional law lecturer. “That’s Congress 101.”

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The demotion from "professor" is interesting in the light of the omission of "Banana Republic" since America pretty much qualifies as one by the definition in Wikipedia if you remember that the bank and automobile maker bailouts enriched private enterprise by socializing the losses on the backs of the taxpayers:

In economics, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by a collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, in which the profit derived from the private exploitation of public lands is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are a public responsibility. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country, and tends to cause the national currency to become devalued paper-money, rendering the country ineligible for international development-credit. Such government by thieves is a kleptocracy; such a kleptocratic government is manipulated by foreign (corporate) interests, and functions mostly as ceremonial government that is unaccountable to its nation. The national legislature is, in effect, for sale, influential government employees illegitimately exploit their posts for personal gain (by embezzlement, fraud, bribery, etc.), and the resulting government budget deficit is repaid by the country's working people who earn wages rather than making profits.

Better, apparently, to deflate his credentials than face his fascism.

Citigroup VP Pleads Guilty to Embezzling Millions Between '03 and '10

And he's only 35 NOW, according to this story:

A former vice president for Citigroup pleaded guilty Tuesday to embezzling more than $22 million from the company and funneling the money to his personal bank account.

Gary Foster, 35, pleaded guilty to bank fraud, admitting that he took the money between 2003 and 2010. He appeared in U.S. district court in Brooklyn before Judge Eric Vitaliano.

Bankers Scamming the American People Out of Hundreds of Millions of Dollars

Bloomberg.com has an interesting look inside a bank failure, describing the crimes which occur but never get prosecuted, unless you happen to be a small fry criminal:

If you were a banker, which of the following activities would be more likely to land you a quick trip to the federal penitentiary? Is it:

(a) Misrepresenting your dying bank’s financial condition in order to secure almost $300 million in TARP bailout cash and then quickly proceeding to lose it all, or

(b) Embezzling about $235,000 from your employer to support your compulsive-gambling addiction and pay off personal debts?

The correct answer, naturally, is “b.” In this country, when it comes to matters of high-finance crime and punishment, little pigs get slaughtered, while hogs get fat -- convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff being this rule’s most notable exception. ...

The large scale crimes are [m]ainly those related to overvalued loans and understated losses. ... where bank employees lied to ... auditors, intentionally delayed loan writedowns and altered documents to hide credit losses.

That's why we highlight "overvaluations" of reported assets when we report on Bank Failure Fridays, just to try to provide some perspective on the scope of the chicanery going on.

Read the complete story here.