October 19, 2017

Larry Flynt wants to give you $10 million

by

This one’s a win-win. In a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, Larry Flynt (yeah, the guy who runs Hustler) says he’ll give ten million dollars to anyone who can offer “information leading to the impeachment and removal from office of Donald J. Trump.”

In a piece for that paper, Amy B. Wang says Flynt is looking for a “smoking gun” — something “buried in Trump’s tax returns,” or a “quid pro quo arrangement with the Russians,” or a way in which government business has been “compromised to protect the business of the Trump empire.”

Of course, those of us who have read Barbara Radnofsky’s A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment know that Trump has already committed plenty of very public impeachable offenses. According to the Constitution, the threshold for impeachment is “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which the Founding Fathers describe (and centuries of law confirm) as any act that may pose a significant threat to society.

Like, I don’t know, lying about your relationship with a foreign power. Or firing a government official for investigating that relationship. This is just off the top of my head.

If you haven’t read Radnofsky’s book yet, do it! But just as importantly, encourage your representatives to do it. Any member of the House of Representatives can file a resolution to impeach the president, and from there the process is pretty straightforward: If a simple majority in the House votes in favor of just one article of impeachment, he’s officially impeached and the charges against him go to the Senate, where a two-thirds majority vote will remove him from office. Read more about this from Radnofsky herself, who this week had two (count ’em) op-eds on the subject, one at the Washington Post and one at the Los Angeles Times.

So let’s get this show on the road! Melville House is on a mission to get A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment to every member of Congress, and for every book purchased on this page of our website (we’ve cut the price down to $8), we’ll send a copy to a Senator or Representative. We’ll also cover the shipping costs.

And Larry, I’m on Venmo.

 

 

Taylor Sperry is a former Melville House editor.

MobyLives