Students at CSI Choose Whether or Not To Impeach Donald Trump

By: Michael A. Viveros

CSI Political Science Department Hosts Impeachment discussion. Credit: csi.cuny.edu

With the House of Representatives vote to proceed with President Donald Trump’s impeachment just a few days away, CSI held an event Tuesday to discuss the topic. 

“I think it’s really important that faculty do things like this,” said Political Science Professor Michael Paris. “Students often feel like they don’t necessarily count or matter that much.” 

The event was held by professors in the Political Science department to give students, and even other Professors, the opportunity to discuss their opinion on whether Trump should be impeached.

 For those who did not know much about impeachment, slides were shown before they opened the discussion that explained how impeachment works and the requirements for it to be used. 

The discussion about whether or not to impeach Trump came days before the vote to decide whether to proceed with the impeachment process. Democrats have pushed for impeachment because they believe Trump has committed enough actions that are impeachable. 

The general opinion of those at the event supported the Trump’s Impeachment. Only two people in a room of approximately 30 raised their hand when the room was asked who would not vote to impeach Trump. 

Political Science Professor Richard Flanagan was not surprised by the ratio of people in support of Trump’s impeachment, attributing it to the general liberalness of CUNY students and New Yorkers. 

“If Obama had done what Trump is accused of doing that honestly with all due respect, we wouldn’t be here today,” said Luke Gemma. “We wouldn’t be talking about this and we wouldn’t even be considering forcibly removing him from office.” 

Luke was one of the few who raised his hand when asked who would not vote to impeach Trump. Although he would not identify himself as a Trump supporter, he did not believe it was necessary to impeach him. 

Luke’s Obama statement did not sit well with a few people in attendance. Vasilios Petratos, an Economics Professor at CSI, emphatically dismissed the hypothetical by claiming Obama never did and never would do things that Trump does. Petratos stated he was an immigrant and mentioned his dissatisfaction for Trump multiple times. 

Although there were not a lot of people in attendance to support Trump, Paris believed there was still a good amount of debate and did not believe it hurt the discussion. He mentioned ideas to try to even the playing field for future discussions of the president, but was still pleased with the results nonetheless. 

The generally pro-impeachment stance did not maintain throughout the entirety of the discussion. Although most still believed he deserved to be impeached, a few became uncertain about whether they believed going through the impeachment process would be worth it. 

Given that the presidential election is about a year away, it was mentioned that the process of impeaching him would take up a lot of time with no certainty of his removal from office. No U.S. President has ever been removed from office through impeachment. With Republicans having the majority in the Senate, the likelihood of him being removed from office is not perceived to be high. 

Some students believed that the Democrats efforts should not be on impeaching Trump, but instead on next year’s election. A couple students expressed their concern that there would not be a strong enough democratic candidate to go against Trump in 2020, and believed too much of the candidates focus was on Trump’s impeachment as opposed to their own campaign. 

“I think November 3rd is going to be a big day for centuries ahead for the U.S.,” said one student. “Impeachment or not, November 3rd is going to decide everything.”