“We need a way of impeaching a rogue POTUS who has over 1/3 hard-core support in the Senate. It seems to me that that should be possible, but that it should be painful for those who do it.”
So there’s no ‘happy ending’. If I correctly guessed what you are ‘aiming’ for, it’s not all that great an idea.
I worked out a plan that is much more optimistic than hoping for that the ‘final, desperate, last-stand branch’ of power to somehow save the day.
Or maybe you mean the ‘Utah Option’? Either way, I prefer constitutional smart-bomb technology to some daisy-cutter solution, no matter how few words it takes to detonate a MOAB.
... and ...
“... if the states find a POTUS unacceptable, they can amend the Constitution to assign the job to some other individual. Probably but not necessarily VPOTUS.”
I don’t know if I fully understand your thinking there. If you mean to amend the Constitution so that the President could be ‘removed by the states’, right on! A super-majority support of course.
Just imagine the ‘Arizona Confrontation’ President Ebola waged. He went after the state for trying to enforce federal immigration law, and a number of states were outraged, but that anger was impotent because there’s no accountability toward the states anymore, and there never was much to begin with.
A 2/3 super-majority might not have been reachable back then, but that would have spurred a state-level campaign issue which could have built momentum for impeachment of the president in a few years’ time and ‘flushed out’ the central-power zealots who were feeding off taxpayers [aka ‘elected’] at the state level.