Six on Impeachment: How Donald Trump will escape impeachment’s clutches; White House Ukraine Expert Sought to Correct Transcript of Trump Call; Why Originalism Should Apply to Impeachment; Top Senate Republicans Claim Impeachment Resolution Denies Tr
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"Given Mr. Trump’s well-illustrated readiness to defy rules and conventions, there are also questions as to whether Congress will be able to impose its will on him.
In the case of the Richard Nixon impeachment, a bipartisan consensus on his guilt emerged. The quest for Mr. Trump’s ouster has already been reduced to tribal warfare. The outcome of the House vote will likely be framed as illegitimate, a result of partisan zealotry.
Revelations on Mr. Trump’s scheming with Ukraine have been pouring in for weeks. Not many find them shocking, not in the context of the standards he has already set.
While there’s support for the impeachment inquiry in the polls, the President’s personal support numbers haven’t slipped much and will likely trend upward, owing to the capture and death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
If it so happens that the Senate not only votes to impeach but also to bar Mr. Trump from ever seeking public office again, that’s still not necessarily the end of the convulsive Trump drama.
There are other Trumps waiting in the wings, most notably Don Jr., to pick up the torch. He could well enjoy the support of his father’s base. He could run in his place."
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"The idea of impeachment had first arisen on June 2, but an extensive debate over the issue occurred on July 19 and 20th. Governeur Morris of Pennsylvania, among others, was opposed since it would endanger a president’s independence and the separation of powers. Morris’ objections were addressed by a large group of delegates, led by two Virginians, George Mason and James Madison. Mason thought that impeachment was essential to ensure the integrity of elections, and that the rule of law should apply to everyone. “Shall any man be above justice?” Mason asked. He was concerned that a “man who has practiced corruption & by that means procured his appointment” would “escape punishment” in the absence of the power of impeachment. Concerns about foreign interference in elections were raised by Madison, who feared a president “might betray his trust to foreign powers” or “pervert his administration in a scheme of peculation [embezzlement] or oppression.” By the end of the debate, Morris changed his mind and supported the power of impeachment.
That was where matters stood until September 8, when the Convention needed to finally settle on what would constitute the grounds for impeachment. Morris indicated that the reasons for impeachment should “be enumerated & defined.” But the delegates struggled with an appropriate definition. Words like malpractice or maladministration were suggested but were too vague and “will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate,” according to Madison. Presidents should not be impeached because they were unpopular or incompetent, nor for policy differences. Finally, Mason recommended that “high crimes and misdemeanors” be added to bribery and treason as reasons for impeachment.
High crimes and misdemeanors seem vague to us in the twenty-first century. “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history,” Gerald Ford once said. While there is some truth to Ford’s observation, a better approach is that high crimes and misdemeanors should be interpreted within the republican ideology of the period and the overall debate that the Framers had over the issue of impeachment. They thought that the power of impeachment should be reserved for abuses of power, especially those that involved elections, the role of foreign interference, and actions that place personal interest above the public good. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 65, impeachable acts are “POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society themselves.” The historian Jeffrey Engel has written that the Framers had “a shared understanding of the phrase” and succinctly describes “impeachable offenses [as] those perpetrated with sinister intent to harm the republic for personal gain.” Tribe and Matz write that high crimes and misdemeanors may not involve a crime at all, but rather “corruption, betrayal, or an abuse of power that subverts core tenants of the US governmental system…that risk grave injury to the nation.”
Impeachment should be a last resort, the nuclear option, when all the other methods of checking the abusive power of a president have become inadequate. It is not something to be celebrated, but rather to be used solemnly to protect American democracy. As Hamilton wrote, the process of impeachment can be divisive, agitating “the passions of the whole community… [dividing] it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.” Trump’s actions reflect a person who either does not know right from wrong or who believes he is above the law. As such, Trump was willing to coerce a foreign government in order to discredit a political opponent. If left unchecked, he will continue to repeat actions like this (we already know he has attempted to pressure Australia), which will undermine the integrity of the 2020 election. As the August 12, 2019 whistle blower report indicates, “the President of United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election” in order to advance his personal interests.” This falls squarely within the reasons why the Framers included the power of impeachment in the Constitution. In this case, the fears of the Founders, and our fears, line up perfectly."
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Trump and the Divine Rights of Kings
"Historical comparison is a fickle and ambiguous gambit; I don’t want to belabor the similarities beyond comprehension. There are cultural, social, and political differences that are so profound that it would be an act of intellectual malpractice for me to claim that 2019 bears too much similarity with 1649. In more superficial attributes concerning temperament, forbearance, and faith,there’s little that’s similar about the two. A reading of Eikon Basilike demonstrates that as unconvincing and self-serving as Charles’ theological arguments may be, they were genuine; a reading of Trump’s Twitter feed shows him to be a man of seemingly limitless non-faith (even while his evangelical supporters pretend otherwise).
But in another sense the two men do share a certain philosophy of power, whereby that which is invested in the head of state is seemingly limitless and always justified by the simple fact that they’re the ones who are wielding it. For Charles, this was religiously justified – the monarch was touched by God and so was allowed authority over other men. Trump’s reasoning bears more similarity to the fascist rhetorical trope of conflating the leader with some amorphous, ambiguous, faceless sense of “The People” (even while a majority of Americans now support impeachment and removal from office). Nonetheless, the conclusion is the same – nothing that the leader does can be illegal simply because the leader is the one doing it."
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The Circus Comes to the House Impeachment Inquiry
"It was lost on no one that the assault on the scif came a day after what by many accounts had been one of the most damaging witness testimonies against Trump so far. Taylor had largely corroborated a whistle-blower complaint from August that accused the President of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” In his opening statement, Taylor provided the impeachment investigators with a detailed time line of what looked very much like a quid pro quo. Taylor said that he had learned, via Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., and others, that Trump was personally threatening to withhold a face-to-face meeting with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, along with three hundred and ninety million dollars in military aid, until Zelensky agreed to investigate an unfounded conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as well as a second unfounded (and until then unrelated) conspiracy theory that Joe Biden, while Vice-President, had helped his son Hunter by forcing the government to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor.
A few hours into the sit-in, the Republicans ordered Chick-fil-A and pizza. The incursion necessitated an electronic sweep by the Sergeant at Arms to re-secure the scif, and delayed Cooper’s testimony by five hours. According to Val Demings, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee and a former police chief, the Republicans who came into the conference room started yelling at Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, about the need for transparency. “I felt, O.K., here we go,” Demings said. “Because I’ve been in the presence of gang members and mobs before.” Demings and other members of the Intelligence Committee said that they were particularly saddened that the interruption took place in the scif. “It’s not a sacred space, but it’s danggone sure pretty important,” Demings said. “Imagine if there was a group of people who thought someone on trial was being unjustly or unfairly treated, but they decided to just storm the courtroom, overthrow the bench, run the judge out of town, and say, ‘Nope, he hasn’t been treated fairly, so we’re not gonna let this trial go forward.’ ”
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