Hello!

イーオン日立校カウンセラーのShokoです！

本日のJesse先生ブログはアメリカの政治についてです。う～ん、勉強になります！どうぞお楽しみください★

What do you talk about with your friends? With your family? Co-workers? There are a few common topics, such as sports or movies or the weather. In the US, one of the most common topics is politics. Part of being an adult in American is learning about politics, even if you aren't very interested. If you don't know anything about politics, it is hard to join a lot of conversations.

Today I want to help you understand a bit about current US politics. To talk to an American about these topics, you don't need to understand in great detail. You only need to know the basic idea of what's going on, and who the people involved are. Knowing these things will help you have a conversation with any American, and for really hot topics, any Western person.

The hot topic right now in the US, is impeachment. All of the news agencies are talking about it, every day. "Impeachment" is the system in the US for removing the president. If a president has committed a serious crime, he can be fired. It's a very serious event, and in US history it has only been attempted twice. Both of those times were unsuccessful. A third president, Richard Nixon, was about to be impeached and it might have been successful, but he resigned before the impeachment started. Currently, the first stages of impeachment have started for president Trump.

What did Trump do? Well, he's done a lot of stuff, and most of it is in a gray area that is strange for a president, but maybe not against the rules. Recently however, he had a conversation that was worse than normal. The US gives a lot of money and military support to the Ukraine. However, president Trump talked to the president of the Ukraine, and hinted that he would stop giving the Ukraine support, unless they did him a favor. He wanted them to do an investigation into the son of Joe Biden. Joe Biden is probably going to be the person Trump fights against in the 2020 election. Using US financial and military support as a way to get a foreign country to attack a political rival is very much against the law.

So how does it work? In the US government, there are two main groups, similar to the Japanese diet. One is the House, and the other is the Senate. Impeachment starts in the House. The House starts by interviewing a lot of people and collecting information. That's what they are doing now, so there is a lot of news about the results of those interviews. After they are finished interviewing everybody, they will vote on whether to impeach the president, or not. So far, this has only happened to Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton.

If the House votes to impeach the president, it becomes the Senate's turn. The Senate will have a trial, like a courtroom drama on TV. There will be lawyers, witnesses, and all of the senators will be the judges. At the end of the trial, the Senate will vote guilty, or not guilty. If they vote guilty, the president will be removed from his position, and the vice president will become president. This has never happened before; both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were decided to be not guilty by the Senate.

How do things look for president Trump? Basically, not good. There's a lot of evidence showing what he did, and it seems pretty clear that it was bad. However... There are two political parties in the US. The democrats, and the republicans. Trump is a republican. No matter what the evidence is, the political parties in the US are very strong. All of the democrats want to impeach Trump, and all of the republicans are against it.

Remember, right now the House is interviewing people, and eventually they will vote about it. If more than 50% of the House votes yes, it will go to the next stage. Currently, a lot more than 50% of the House are democrats, so it is very likely they will vote yes, and the impeachment will move to the next stage, which is in the Senate. However, the Senate is 100 people, and 53 of them are republicans. Also, a successful guilty vote requires 67% of the vote, not only 50%. That means removing Trump requires 20 of the 53 republicans to vote against Trump. So far, none of them are supporting that idea, so it seems very unlikely that it will happen.

In the end, Trump is probably going to be the third president in US history to be impeached, but like the other two, the impeachment will fail and he will stay president.

Confused? Me too! But that's politics: a confusing mess. That's why it's a fun conversation topic for Americans!