Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide

by Cass R. Sunstein

One of the best ways to keep faith with the founding document is to avoid resorting to the impeachment mechanism without sufficient cause. Use of the mechanism can transform political disagreement into charges of criminality or egregious wrongdoing. (“Lock him up!”) It can be a way of stirring up the ugliest forces of anger and destruction. It can be a product of, and fuel, scandal-mongering and fake news. It can jeopardize the separation of powers. It can be profoundly destabilizing. It focuses the nation’s attention on whether to remove its leader—rather than how to promote economic growth, reduce premature deaths, increase national security, or cut poverty. It can increase partisan rage, with the suggestion that the principal figure in one of the nation’s political parties, and the winner of a national election, is not merely a bad president but guilty of terribleness and horrors. It leads political opponents to focus obsessively on how to prove that terribleness and those horrors, whether or not they exist.