Last Wednesday the Democrats voted to impeach Donald Trump. Two articles were approved, with no Republicans voting with the Dems; abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The first charge is almost too vague to understand, but it seems House Democrats believe that Mr. Trump has accrued too much power as President and has used it to enrich himself and his cronies. Except that such a charge has no basis in law, for every President finds himself at odds with the Congress from time to time. If this is the basis for impeaching Presidents, the abuse of the office of the Presidency began with George Washington. He rode out at the head of an “army” in 1794 to confront farmers who were protesting the infamous whiskey taxes. Since then, the Presidency has grown in size (the Executive Branch) and power and reach. No Chief Executive wants to take a lesser role in relationship to the other two branches, so they have acted almost as a law unto themselves.
Forgotten in this brouhaha was the Dems favorite President, Barack Obama. He, too, acted alone when he felt he was not getting his way. Who can forget the time when he claimed, if Congress would not act, he had a “phone and a pen” to get what he wanted. And each of his predecessors can be criticized for accruing more power to himself than the Constitution allows.
There are no laws which talks about obstruction of Congress. A very weak argument is made that because the President did not cooperate in the manner the House wanted, Trump obstructed their will. But when you have three equal branches of the federal government, there will always be clashes and the framers properly did not criminalize these clashes.
But I posit that those who wanted Trump impeached and removed from office over look one small five letter word which illustrates just how weak, how political, how insufficient and how pathetic these charges are.
Our Constitution, in the clause allowing impeachment, says simply, that the President can be removed from office after a successful trial in the Senate for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Those who have conducted this process in the House have made clear that the President does not need to have committed any crime in order to be impeached. But a simple reading indicates that “high crimes and misdemeanors” should be on a par with the listed crimes of treason and bribery. Yet that phrase shows that a President must commit a crime on a par with the listed reasons for removing him from office. None was shown and none was charged.
Actions that constitute those charges cannot be vague phrases like “abuse of power” unless that abuse violates law. Misdemeanors cannot be as simple as jaywalking or a traffic violation. That word other does not allow for anything else to be a basis for putting the country, or the President through this ordeal unless it is an egregious violation of his oath of office.
The two other impeachment proceedings in the immediate past successfully navigated the wording of the Constitution. In 1972, Richard Nixon was charged with violating written statutes when he covered up the Watergate breakin and paid hush money to keep the perpetrators from talking about the crime. Nixon resigned when it became clear he would not only be impeached but convicted and kicked out of office.
In 1998, Bill Clinton was charged with two crimes in his attempt to cover up his affair with a young volunteer intern, with the actions taking place in the Oval Office.
Senators in 1999 failed to find him guilty, as neither of the two charges both felonies under law, could muster a majority voting to convict, much less the 2/3 needed.
What both instances showed was that the indictment was not strong enough to satisfy Senators that the charges met the standard of “other high crimes and misdemeanors”, leaving standard intact.
Not only do the Republicans have 53 Senators, effectively keeping the President in office, but several have already indicated they see the impeachment charges as not serious enough to entertain, and more partisan and political than statesmanlike.
Those who wrote the Constitution knew what they were doing when they inserted “other” into the phrase. Today’s Democrats somehow failed simple English in school, for their charges fall far short of the standard set down in 1787. They have no crime.