Be careful what you wish for. The impeachment process will be slow, messy, ugly and also provide an opportunity for a stronger republican challenger in 2020. Also you will get president Pence who is gross in his own special but slightly less embarrassing way.
With a Trump impeachment we will either get Pence as the front runner or some other candidate that will take the ticket. Both are going to be stronger contenders than the current version of Trump. Pence will get an incumbent boost and any new party will probably have the be pretty popular, either one could be a strong contender. The Democrats are doing a lot of infighting between the progressive wing and the establishment NeoLiberal wing. There is a high likelihood (50-60%) that the democratic party establishment will once again try to push through the weakest electableish candidate, the result of that could very well be another meh election where both candidates are equally blah and uninspiring. In a situation like that republicans have much better odds than in election where Trump is running and reasonable people will show up just to vote trump out.
Interesting. Nixon's resignation was not a positive for Ford; even without pardoning him, Ford was a weak also-ran that had zero electoral mandate. Carter and Mondale took that election 297-240 and Carter was a hick outsider from Georgia. Nobody voted for Pence for vice president. Appointees have that problem in common: the electorate didn't get to choose, so the electorate has no loyalty. And a party under cloud is a party under cloud; the fact that the Freedom Caucus is now attempting to impeach Rod Rosenstein is not a fact that the Democrats will let anyone forget.
i'd prefer a bumbling idiot over mike "boy with long hair? to the electric chair!" pence
Dude totally the opposite of that. Imagine the shit we'd be in if these guys didn't suck at their jobs. What if the muslim ban hadn't been totally half-cocked? What if they'd brought Bolton in day 1 by design instead of day 600 by default? What if they'd been able to collude with Russia without posting the very emails in a bass-ackward attempt to prove their innocence? I like my antagonists as dumb as they come. It minimizes the lasting damage. Visualize, for a moment, the hell we'd be in if we had President Tom DeLay.
I'm not convinced. Pretty much every federal department, maybe excluding the military ones, is going to have a lot of catching up to do when we have a functional executive branch again. President Pence trying to pound his bullshit through a hostile congress, and the bureaucracy functioning normally again, still looks like the less dire scenario to me.
Presupposes a hostile congress. Suppose Democrats win house and senate. Suppose they shoot the moon. It's not like Mitch McConnell is going away. At 255-179, under a Democratic president, the 111th Congress barely passed Obamacare. We don't get to "all better" from here. We get to "maybe a little less fucked." And in the meantime, the less skill and artistry employed by the executive branch the better off we shall all be.
McConnell is old, and if he loses the Senate I'm not so sure that he would retire rather than face re-election in 2020 at the age of 78. Then again Kentucky would just replace him with an Alex Jones/Breitbart ultra winger who wants no public education funding and would work to bulldoze the Appalachians for the last crumbs of coal.