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Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.
I liked Nixon, and I didn’t much like the Democrats, and I was torn.
There is no question that the effort to impeach Clinton was politically motivated;
The impeachment clause is a sibling to the titles of nobility clause.
The French Revolution shook the world, and so did the Russian Revolution. The American Revolution seems much milder.
Thurgood Marshall’s quip to Prince Philip was an outgrowth of distinctly American thinking in the last four decades of the eighteenth century.
indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.”
“Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”
Many people believed that one of the virtues of the impeachment mechanism was that, in view of its availability, “people did not have to take their complaints against officeholders into the streets.”
Remarkably, there was apparently no discussion of just what “other high crimes and misdemeanors” meant. Those words seem to be a bit like the cavalry, coming at the end to save the day.
Let’s underline his point. We the People can oust a president, if we insist, but we have to run the gauntlet.
if a president did the kinds of things that Hastings did, he should not be able to retain office, even if neither treason nor bribery was involved.
The United States, unlike some other democracies, does not allow votes of no confidence.
If we are interested in knowing what reasonable readers of the Constitution thought that it meant in 1787, the arguments in defense of ratification are probably the best source.
As always, Hamilton is a terrific place to start.
the relevant high crimes and misdemeanors must run “against the United States.”
not of mistakes of judgment or of controversial political choices but of terrible abuses of power.
If the president uses the pardon power in a corrupt way, by pardoning crimes that he has himself advised (and thus sheltering the wrongdoer), impeachment is the remedy.
The emoluments clause protects the nation against officials who have been compromised by receiving gifts from foreign nations.
“He is to regulate all intercourse with foreign powers, and it is his duty to impart to the senate every material intelligence he receives.”
For some people, the answer to such questions is obvious: the Constitution’s meaning is settled by the understandings of those who ratified it.
Whether we are bound by the original understanding depends on whether we conclude, on principle, that we should be bound by the original understanding. Those who reject originalism believe that our constitutional order is far better if we conclude that we are not bound.
The problem is that we cannot discern, from history, anything like a clear understanding of the idea of high crimes and misdemeanors.
But even if you don’t love originalism in general, you might love it for impeachment. That might seem like an opportunistic position, but it has unmistakable logic.
One of the best ways to keep faith with the founding document is to avoid resorting to the impeachment mechanism without sufficient cause.
Here’s a list of the fifteen worst, according to a survey of presidential historians in 2017.
The largest lesson of the three serious impeachment efforts is simple: in each case, it was an overwhelmingly partisan affair.
As always, Hamilton was prescient,
In 1974, the Supreme Court agreed with that claim, ruling that the president has a presumptive right not to disclose his conversations. (The case had a terrific name: United States v. Nixon.)
If we assume that the second article accurately stated the facts, the vote should have been unanimous; partisanship prevented many Republicans from doing their constitutional duty.
If a president uses the apparatus of government in an unlawful way, to compromise democratic processes and to invade constitutional rights, we come to the heart of what the impeachment provision is all about.
He was definitely slick, but as it happened, he was innocent of almost all of the charges.
Did Clinton commit high crimes or misdemeanors? In Starr’s report, it would be difficult to find any.
If the claims are true, Clinton did commit perjury in connection with his efforts to cover up a sexual relationship. That’s unlawful. But under the constitutional framework, it’s not close to a basis for impeachment, because it’s not an egregious abuse of presidential authority.
A strong majority of impeached officials—thirteen of the nineteen—have been federal district court judges.
Lying to Americans about extramarital affairs is bad. But lying to Americans about the rationale for a war, and for putting human lives on the line, is impeachable.
But if the executive branch is engaged in systematic misconduct, if it occurred on the president’s watch, and if he failed to do anything about it, we have likely crossed the threshold into misdemeanors within the meaning of the Constitution.
Terrible judgment, laziness, incompetence, and even impeachable acts do not justify invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
The real risk is not that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment will be invoked when it shouldn’t, but that it won’t be invoked when it should.
It is generally agreed that members of Congress are not civil officers of the United States and so are not subject to impeachment.
the Clinton and Johnson impeachments violated the constitutional standard, but neither president was convicted.)
Though reasonable people can differ, my conclusion is that the president cannot be indicted while in office.
America’s citizens have had no tyrants, in part because of the constitutional design. The Constitution is still in force.
It took a Civil War to abolish slavery. Until 1920, women could be forbidden from voting. Until 1954, the Constitution allowed states to segregate people by race. Freedom of speech did not flower until the 1960s.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, attempting to vindicate the freedom of speech, warned that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”5
Whenever Americans strike a blow against some form of tyranny, large or small, we are honoring our nation’s highest ideals, and those who were willing to live and die for them.
It is not a “misdemeanor” to act on the basis of a sincere and reasonable belief that one is entitled to do so.
