In National Review, far right winger Andrew McCarthy is being dragged reluctantly to the precipice, but he wants to remind us impeachment isn’t about crime, which seems to have captured the minds of pundits on the left & right, but about the Constitution:
The standard for impeachment, the commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” is not concerned with criminal offenses found in the penal statute books and suitable for courtroom prosecution. It relates instead to the president’s high fiduciary duty to the American people and allegiance to our system of government.
Alexander Hamilton put it best in Federalist No. 65. Impeachable offenses are those
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.
The bickering over collusion “crimes” misses the point. If an unfit person holds the presidency, the danger to our society is that he will abuse the power that he wields. The imperative is to remove him from office. Whether, in addition to that, his misconduct also happens to violate penal statutes and be ripe for criminal prosecution is a side issue. It is a subordinate legal question, whereas fitness for the presidency is a core political issue. That is why it is rightly observed that impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one.
We are a good distance from being able to assess whether President Trump should be impeached. It is specious, though, to suggest that this is not a question worthy of exploration, or that its answer hinges on whether collusion with Russia amounts to a criminal-law violation.
Our aspiration for presidential fitness is something more than “nothing he has done is indictable.” Abuses of trust go to the core of self-determining, republican governance. It is fatuous to fret over whether they also amount to, say, campaign-finance infractions — even “major” offenses in that category, such as the 2008 Obama campaign’s acceptance of nearly $2 million in illegal contributions, are so trivial in the greater scheme of things that they are commonly settled by the payment of an administrative fine.
All politicians practice a certain economy with the truth, but flat-out lying to the American people on a significant matter is a major abuse of trust. And forfending collusion with a foreign sovereign was an imperative for the Framers.
And I liked this:
The principal duty of the president is to safeguard the nation against foreign threats to our security and system of government. If a president instead has put them at greater risk, if he has conducted himself in such a way as to raise the specter of blackmail by a foreign power, it is always appropriate to question his fitness for the nation’s highest office.
And it’s true there’s nothing in the Constitution stating the President shall be deprived of office merely for violating the law. His position is important in absolute terms. A few violations here and there may be viewed as inevitable in an organization as large as the Executive.
But it’s the accumulation and pattern which is trouble, as I’m sure McCarthy would agree. If our President is incompetent or compromised, then he should be deprived of his position. There must be the reasonable admission of trust, of predictability, in our President, as we had with Obama and Bush I (the two that seemed the most trustworthy in my lifetime; I confess I hardly recall President Carter). President Trump’s long and continual record of lies may constitute a predictable pattern, but not a good one, not something worthy of pride and continued service.
And if he doesn’t think he’s lying, then it implies an incompetence of breathtaking proportions.
