The Founding Fathers carefully set up the constitution to prevent the worst thing that they could imagine happening: a leader taking upon himself absolute power and ruling as a king, answerable to no one but himself. They had fought a revolution and won it against all odds in order to free themselves from the tyranny of such a ruler, and their devout wish for this new, young nation, was that it should never come under the finger of such a tyrant. Thus they set up the system of checks and balances. Thus they set up Congress to make laws, the Supreme Court to determine their constitutionality, and the President to enforce them. Thus also, they set in place ways by which a president could be removed from office should he become incapable through mental or physical illness of carrying out his duties, or should he commit a crime against the people that he served. Benjamin Franklin noted in 1787 that the frequent method of removing unwanted rulers was by assassination and suggest that impeachment would be a more civilized method. And so, impeachment became the process to remove a president who has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” according to Article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
In Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton described the subject of impeachment as “those offences 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.”
Yet, to remove from office one who has been duly elected by the people through the Electoral College is a grave matter. It overturns an election. It negates the will of the people. And so the process was made two-fold. The House of Representatives would vote to “impeach” a president by a simple majority just as a prosecutor or a grand jury would choose to “indict” an ordinary citizen. That process in either case does not determine the guilt of the individual. In the case of an ordinary citizen, guilt or innocence is determined through a trial where a jury of 12 decides the fate of the accused. In the case of the president, guilt or innocence is determined by a vote of the 100 members of the Senate. Sixty-seven of them must vote to convict in order to remove a president from office.
No president has ever been removed from office by impeachment although two were impeached and two others came close. Andrew Johnson was impeached because Congress had passed a law saying that a president could not dismiss members of his cabinet without the approval of Congress. When he dismissed Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, whom the law was basically passed to protect, the House voted to impeach him. The underlying cause of their dislike for Johnson was his sympathetic treatment of southerners following the Civil War. The dismissal of the cabinet member was only the excuse. The Senate, however, fell 1 vote short of finding him guilty and thus Andrew Johnson remained in office.
Members of Congress introduced a resolution to impeach John Tyler over States’ Rights issues, but the resolution failed.
Representatives were debating whether or not to impeach Richard Nixon over the Watergate break-in when he resigned the presidency, making the impeachment a moot point.
The second president to actually be impeached was Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. There was no question that Clinton had both lied on television to the American people as well as under oath about his affair. Neither was their any question that he had obstructed justice in attempting to cover up the affair. Nevertheless, a Democratic Senate failed to find him guilty.
A close look at the two cases mentioned above will reveal that impeachment has been without fail mostly political in nature, rather than a process to remove a leader that had turned against the people who had elected him as the Founders intended. In the case of Andrew Johnson, Johnson, who had served as Lincoln’s vice-president, had been a senator from Tennessee before the war. Despite the fact that he was a southern Democrat, he had remained loyal to the Union and loyal to Lincoln’s desire to heal the wounds of the ravaged nation. Many northern Republicans, however, were more interested in punishing the southerners as viciously as possible, and thus were disgusted and irate at the president’s views. They impeached him, not because he had broken a law they had passed in order to tie his hands, but because they hated his politics.
In the case of Bill Clinton, he had indeed committed perjury and obstruction of justice. But he would have done neither had he not been hounded by those who felt he had defiled the White House and the office of the President by his actions. And to be truthful, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had done as much, having members of the Secret Service smuggle prostitutes into the White House for his sexual pleasure, right under the noses of his wife and children. Other presidents have lied to the American people. Franklin Roosevelt, leading an anti-war nation and in the face of the desperation of our British allies, sent American ships to hunt down Nazi submarines and then lied about it. Barak Obama, in order to pass his landmark health care bill, assured Americans that if they liked their doctors and their insurance, they would be able to keep them, even though he knew perfectly well that they could not. And, faced with a re-election battle against Mitt Romney, he lied about the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, telling us that it had been a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video rather than a terrorist attack. To ram home his story, he had the maker of the film arrested and imprisoned. But it was a terrorist attack, as everyone in his administration knew in real time. Spontaneous demonstrators don’t carry rocket launchers.
So other presidents have lied and gotten away with it because they had congresses of their own party, or because the truth didn’t come out until later, or because congressional members remembered the devastating effect of Watergate on the nation and chose not to inflict that sort of numbing trauma on our country again. But while a Republican-led congress voted to impeach President Clinton, a Democratic-led Senate found him not guilty of the charges and then took a victory picture on the steps of the Senate. All political.
So also, is the question of impeaching President Donald Trump. He is hated by the Democrats because he beat Hillary Clinton and is hated by Democrats and many establishment Republicans as well because he is an outsider, a billionaire businessman who had never before held office, who had no ties to lobbyists and is beholding to no Washington insider groups. He is not “one of them.” It now appears that the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee, working together with some members of the FBI and Department of Justice, created a fail-safe, an “insurance policy” as former FBI agent Peter Strozk called it, to prevent Trump’s election or, if he by some remote chance won, to have him removed from office. They hired a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had a contact in Russia provide him with rumors and stories that were elaborated upon in order to make it seem that candidate Trump had “colluded” with the Russians to steal the election away from Hillary Clinton. Although the FBI knew the material was “opposition research” meaning it had been gathered by the opposing candidate to try to smear Trump, and although they could not prove that any of it was true, they used it and a newspaper story based on the same information and also provided by the same British spy, to get a FISA warrant to literally spy on the Republican candidate’s campaign.
The moment Trump won the election, the stunned left began to shout “impeach!” He must surely have stolen the election, because how else could he have won? Angry, out-of-work people who had been ignored for the past eight years surely could not have voted him into office! And, although first the FBI and later Special Counsel Robert Mueller have pored over wiretaps, emails, and other documents, and have interviewed scores of people, no hint of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians has emerged. Oh, Mueller has indicted individuals, several Russians who will never appear in a U.S. court and a Russian company which did not exist at the time they were supposed to have interfered in the 2016 election. He has also picked off some of the people around Trump and indicted them either for “crimes” unrelated to the President and in most cases which happened years before the individuals became a part of the Trump campaign, or for “lying to the FBI,” a crime which can be easily be charged if the FBI has the transcript of a phone conversation the individual had months prior to the interview date and the individual forgets something he had said. That is all it takes, folks. In the case of General Flynn, he was tricked by the FBI, at former FBI Director Comey’s suggestion, into thinking that the conversation he was having with FBI agents had nothing to do with him, so of course he didn’t need the White House Counsel at his side. It was a political set-up.
Other reasons for impeaching the president have ranged from his firing of James Comey as FBI Director, something which is well within his duties as president; his “travel ban” which the Supreme Court also said is within his duties; his removing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord (which resulted in the U.S. lowering our CO2 emissions more than any other country in the world, including those in the Climate Accord); his moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a move which Congress determined years ago should be made; his paying a porn star to be silent about the sexual encounter she claimed he had with her; his xenophobia, racism, homophobia, hatred of women. . . in other words, anything the left can think of to throw at him.
It is political, all political. If the Democratic House votes to impeach (and there are many Democratic Representatives who understand this would be a foolish move), the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to acquit. And the repercussions will be volcanic. Bill Clinton saw his popularity soar after the failed impeachment. Americans were disgusted by Clinton’s antics with the intern in the White House, but they don’t like the idea of impeaching a president, of overturning an election. It seems to them to be a repudiation of our form of government where power is calmly turned over from one party to another. There may be those on the left who would be happy to see that happen, but they do not reflect Americans as a whole. If President Trump is impeached by the Democratic House, history will repeat itself. Trump will slide to an easy victory in 2020. It is the best thing the Democrats can do to insure a second term for the President.