- What is clear is that high crimes and misdemeanors described far more than mere legal infractions. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that questions of impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
Asked, for instance, about a president who removed executive officials without good reason, James Madison replied that “the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal.” Capricious firings are not a crime, but they were, according to the founders, an impeachable offense.
You know you're in for a reasoned, non-alarmist meditation when you get to the illustrations. The same thing we said about the Reign of Terror, the same thing we said about the rise of Nazi Germany, the same thing we said about the collapse of Vietnam. Futurecrime doesn't exist and never will. The fact that the author doesn't think we're experiencing a " genuine crisis in American democracy" when the Russians have as much as bragged about interceding in the election to destabilize American politics speaks volumes. Thereby demonstrating that expert opinion holds the action to be subject to the discretion of the authority in question. QED, tweetstorms do not rise to the level of "egregious violation of the public trust" until they do. NBC didn't fire Matt Lauer; we did Fundamentally: The Republican Party is in office because of their opposition to liberal reforms. Trump is in office because of his opposition to the status quo. That he does not represent a majority of Americans is inconsequential; he represents a majority of electoral districts. This is where the Republican Party has gone - from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Other Bush to Tea Party to Michelle Bachmann to the spiteful place where it's more important that coastal liberals lose than the holler gets its post office back because nobody really believes the world is coming back but they know that those uppity pinkos in San Francisco must suffer. So the Republican Party does what they can while also doing whatever it takes to keep themselves in office. And so long as Alabama would rather have a sexual predator than a Democrat representing them in the Senate, the sexual predators will have the run of the place. No it's not. It's not at all easier. Impeachment means invalidating the most entrenched and involved democratic process we have. It means placing the will of Parliament above the will of the people. It fundamentally erodes confidence in government because it means the branches that all Americans didn't elect have power over the branch that they did./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9755225/GRENADE_MAP_3000x2000_150dpi.jpg)
Sometimes I imagine this era going catastrophically wrong — a nuclear exchange with North Korea, perhaps, or a genuine crisis in American democracy — and historians writing about it in the future. They will go back and read Trump’s tweets and his words and read what we were saying, and they will wonder what the hell was wrong with us. You knew, they’ll say. You knew everything you needed to know to stop this. And what will we say in response?
In the course of reporting this piece, I spoke to a slew of legal scholars and impeachment specialists. Here is my conclusion: There is no actual definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” There is wide agreement that it describes more than violations of the criminal code, but very little agreement beyond that. When is the “misconduct of public men” impeachable? When does a tweetstorm rise to the level of “egregious violation of the public trust”?
To many of Trump’s supporters — and perhaps many of his opponents — this would look like nothing less than a coup; the swamp swallowing the man who sought to drain it. Imagine the Breitbart headlines, the Fox News chyrons. And would they truly be wrong? Whatever Trump is today, he was that man when he was elected too. The same speech patterns were in evidence; the same distractibility was present. The tweets, the conspiracy theories, the chaos: It was all there. The American people, mediated by the Electoral College, delivered their verdict; mustn’t it now be respected?
But there’s another, more positive, takeaway from Mr. Lauer’s firing, which is that corporations are susceptible to the moral suasion of the public. This might not look like what millennials imagine when they talk about “corporate social responsibility” and “ethical capitalism,” but it’s hard not to see it that way.
In its roughly 240 years of existence, America has had 45 presidents and three serious impeachment proceedings. None of them has led to the removal of a president, though Richard Nixon’s would have if he hadn’t resigned. “It’s very hard to say of 45 presidents in 240 years [that] never, or once if you count Nixon, is the right number of impeachments historically,” Healy continues. “It’s a much easier case to make that we’ve impeached far too infrequently.”
Not the same, but similar in my mind, is other countries' snap elections. In the past two years, so many have had them. Off the top of my head, I think Iceland, Britain, and Japan. Germany might be looking down the barrel of one too, if I'm remembering things correctly. I know they have their place, but I think if governments get too used to the idea of not liking the way things are, they can just hit the reset button, A) leads to too much temptation, B) reduces a commitment to cooperation and compromise, and C) chips away at the importance of regularly scheduled elections and the votes citizens cast in them.No it's not. It's not at all easier. Impeachment means invalidating the most entrenched and involved democratic process we have. It means placing the will of Parliament above the will of the people. It fundamentally erodes confidence in government because it means the branches that all Americans didn't elect have power over the branch that they did.
Indeed, it shouldn't be easy to impeach anyone. We already have a de facto impeachment four years into a president's presidency, and by that standard, many have been removed from office by the people. I suppose the downside is that elections have turned into a pick 'em with regard to who wins; there's basically even odds at this point that the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the electoral college are coincident. The main lever of justice that we have is clearly broken, but I don't think that we should elevate impeachment as a remedy. All that said, I think there is a hell of a good case for the impeachment of Trump, while applying the same standard that we've applied to every past president. It doesn't need to be easier to hold him to account; it only requires the will to do so. 2018 may bring some interesting developments, because it seems that Democrats have a fair chance at taking both houses given the current trajectory. This tax debacle and Roy Moore and the pending Mueller indictments and Trump's continued decay into lunacy are making that more likely every day. If they succeed, what do they do? Impeach, because they think it's the right thing to do? Or sit on it for two more years, because it will increase their chances of winning the presidency in 2020? My opinion is that if you think he's too dangerous to be president, then he's too dangerous to be president. Any political calculation that makes you wait makes you complicit if shit hits the fan (i.e. nuclear war). The new book Collusion seems pretty damning (I haven't read it, but heard the long interview the author did on Fresh Air). You can bet that Mueller knows everything in that book (including which parts are true) backward and forward. If there's a kernel of truth to the most outrageous claims, then the Democrats should be campaigning on a platform of impeachment. It doesn't need to be any easier.