Impeachment And The Consatitution

Last week a right wing relative accused me of disparaging the political opinions of conservatives in general and him in particular. By conservatives he meant far right reactionaries, and I had to admit that he was right about my reaction to them. I simply cannot hide my disdain for the wacky conspiracy theories and total denials of all facts that are inconvenient to them. But in an effort to assuage his ruffled feelings, I apologized. He went into a right wing rant anyhow. The rant included telling me that Justin Trudeau is the bastard son of Fidel Castro, and he concluded by telling me to read the Constitution. At the risk of stating the obvious, he confirmed my worst suspicions about his political opinions. He also ignored a fact he was well aware of, which is that I can teach a class on the constitution. I responded by reminding him of that, and I added, “what are you going to do next, tell a professor of constitutional law to read Marbury v. Madison?”

After this encounter I could not help wondering why he told me to read the constitution when he knew about my education. I think the answer is that he could not help himself. Telling people to read the constitution has become a knee jerk reaction of the reactionaries who are no longer satisfied with waving the flag in your face. At first blush there appears to be a danger to them in using the constitution this way because people who know what the constitution says and have studied the debates and compromises that made it what it is are going to point out things that will refute some of the simplistic twaddle the right wing depends on to validate its ideology. Ah but never fear, the right wing is insulated from all inconvenient facts by their alternative universe; they have poisoned all the wells outside of that universe, and they simply deny any and all facts that do not comport with their beliefs. A perfect example of this is their lack of any reaction to Donald Trump calling the emoluments clause of the constitution "phony." The only thing I can conclude from this failure to defend the constitution from a lawless president is that it is the time and customs of the founders of our country that the right wing cherishes rather than the ideals and work product of our founders. In particular they (the reactionaries) want to go back to a time when white males had all of the privileges and ruled with impunity, and without admitting that that is what want they know that white male primacy is what our founding fathers intended. Fortunately, our founding fathers were wise enough to realize that their great work was imperfect, and they provided a mechanism for changing the Constitution as well as a way for us to remove a lawless, and/or incompetent president from office.

The best way to celebrate the good works of our founding fathers is not to enshrine the flaws in our constitution caused by the need to compromise on difficult issues such as slavery, but to change and perfect the constitution as we have done in the past -- so that it reflects the ideals of a free and democratic society, which includes racial, ethnic, and gender equality. It stands to reason that we must also protect our constitution and the rights it guarantees, including the sanctity of our elections and the checks and balances achieved by the separation of powers among the three branches of our government. One of the greatest fears of our founding fathers was that a President would try to usurp the powers granted to the other branches of government and defy the will of the electorate. Hence we see historical references to Republicans accusing Federalists of wanting to shape the American government to resemble the British monarchy.

In speaking of a well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper 65:

“... The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which 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.”

In Paper 66 he added: “... And it may, perhaps, with no less reason be contended, that the powers relating to impeachments are, as before intimated, an essential check in the hands of that body [meaning congress] upon the encroachments of the executive.” Thus we know that abuse of power is an impeachable crime!

Among the charges brought against Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon is obstruction of Congress, which is in and of itself an impeachable offense and an abuse of power when used to defy lawful subpoenas or suppress the testimony of witnesses called by congress or the courts. Even if you set aside the Mueller Report and the evidence set forth therein, it is obvious that Donald Trump is guilty of obstructing congress in its duty to provide oversight of the executive branch, and an article of impeachment must be drawn up for obstructing congress in order to protect the oversight our constitution provides. Many of Trump's apologists are absurdly claiming that the summary of his now infamous call to Volodymyr Zelensky does not show that a publicly announced investigation digging up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden as well as an investigation of whether it was Ukrainians rather than Russia that hacked the DNC in 2016 were preconditions for the arms Zelensky needed in order to protect his country from the aggression of the Russians. Anyone with an IQ above eighty who has read that summary knows better because the summary shows precisely that Quid Pro Quo! Furthermore, at the risk of sounding like a prosecutor, the House Intelligence committee will produce witnesses who will testify to that quid pro quo. We know this because many of those witnesses have given such testimony in depositions and the opening statements of those witnesses have been made public.

So what will this mean when Republicans switch to defending Trump by saying so what, these offenses do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. Oh really? Extorting a foreign country to interfere in our elections by providing, perhaps even inventing, dirt on a presidential candidate would set the powdered wigs of our founding fathers on fire! It is exactly the sort of thing they feared most! It is a large part of why they provided impeachment and removal from office as a remedy. Trump is the most dangerous and lawless president ever. Move over Nixon, Trump should be the poster boy for impeachment.