Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman of New York served on the House Judiciary Committee that investigated the role of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted to impeach him. Now, in an excerpt from her book, The Case for Impeaching Trump, Congresswoman Holtzman draws connections between the Nixon Administration and the current administration, laying out a clear case for launching impeachment investigations against Donald Trump.

In her excerpt for Salon, Congresswoman Holtzman details the many constitutional violations Trump has perpetrated. These include obstruction of justice and violation of the emoluments clause, among many others.

Holtzman draws a strong parallel between Trump’s actions and those of Nixon, detailing the events that lead to Nixon’s impeachment. She describes the Watergate coverup and Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him. In response, she says, the “American people drew the line:”

They demanded that Congress take action, and it did. It started an inquiry, which resulted in a bipartisan vote for articles of impeachment, forcing Nixon to resign. It was in response to obstruction that the articles of impeachment against Nixon were adopted. Their message? Presidents cannot block, tamper with, and destroy the machinery of justice that is aimed at them. If they do, it is at their peril. They face impeachment, removal from office, even imprisonment. But if we allow presidents to block, tamper with, and destroy the machinery of justice that is aimed at them, we do so at our peril. The rule of law will go up in smoke. We will enshrine two standards of justice, one for the powerful and one for everyone else. We will find ourselves on the road to tyranny.

Congresswoman Holtzman is right. Much like Nixon, Trump has violated the Constitution repeatedly. It is time for Congress to take action – just as it has before in similar circumstances – to launch an impeachment investigation. We must act to preserve a just system that serves everyone, not just the powerful.

She concludes:

Together, President Trump’s actions are indicative of a president who has established a different standard of justice for himself—exactly the kind that we declared impermissible in Nixon’s articles of impeachment. He has done so at the expense of democracy. And he’s done so at his own peril.

The American people demanded justice during the Nixon Administration and we demand justice now.

Read the excerpt from Congresswoman Holztman’s book in Salon here.

Free Speech For People Legal Director Ron Fein recently spoke with Peter Collins on his podcast about impeachment:

Fein thumbnails the impeachment process, and we talk about past cases of impeachment of Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson…

We discuss the recalcitrance toward impeachment shown by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and by Hillary Clinton in a recent interview with Rachel Maddow. Polls show that almost half of voters support impeachment now, but party leaders follow the polls instead of leading on a matter they say threatens the future of the republic. Fein is even-handed, and criticizes Republicans who place party loyalty and tax cuts over the corruption of their leader.

Listen to the interview below! And listen to more interviews from the Peter B. Collins Show here.

In a recent article in the Nation, John Nichols reports on the most recent instance of obstruction of justice perpetrated by Donald Trump.

As Nichols reports, Donald Trump and his administration are seeking to force the declassification of documents and text messages that are relevant to the inquiry into Russian influence on his campaign and his presidency.

The president has ordered the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence to begin the “immediate declassification” of key sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application for Carter Page, who once served as a foreign-policy aide to Trump. The president has also ordered the declassification of “all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications” and “directed the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to publicly release all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of [former FBI director] James Comey, [former acting director of the FBI] Andrew McCabe, [former chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section] Peter Strzok, [former FBI lawyer] Lisa Page, and [former associate deputy Attorney general and former director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force] Bruce Ohr.”

This, as Nichols explains, is obstruction of justice: “Interfering in an ongoing federal investigation with the purpose of subverting the inquiry represents a classic case of obstruction of justice.”

Since taking office, President Trump has repeatedly attempted to interfere with congressional investigations into his conduct and that of his administration. His attempts to obstruct justice are well documented and ongoing, and this most recent example only seeks to strengthen the case for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings.

Nichols compares Trump’s actions to that of Richard Nixon, who resigned before he could be impeached.

In Nixon’s time, Republicans joined Democrats in moving to hold a Republican president to account for obstruction of justice. These are different times. But there can be no excuses for members of Congress, no matter what their partisanship, who fail to recognize that the impeachment power exists to address precisely so lawless a presidency as that of Donald Trump.

John Nichols is right. This is not an issue of partisanship. The impeachment power exists for this very reason and both Democrats and Republicans must stand in support of the Constitution.

Read the article here.