Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong on Lawfare call for impeachment of President Trump and discuss the three areas of concern to national security professionals – and, of course, the rest of us. Then, I fear they start calling for a near miracle as they lay down the guidelines they believe should be followed:
In sum, Trump has embarrassed the presidential office in innumerable ways, and members of the House and Senate are obliged to organize these incidents in their heads and get a handle on their constitutional significance. There is a wrong way and a right way to go about this task. The wrong way is to treat the launch of an impeachment inquiry as a matter of political popularity or opportunism. On this view, the relevant vectors might include polls on Trump’s approval ratings, the results of next year’s midterm elections, and worldwide Google searches for “impeachment” (which soared when Trump fired Director Comey in May and has otherwise ebbed and flowed with the news tide). The right approach is to commit to a clear-eyed and ongoing assessment of Trump’s words and actions against the obligations of the office and to trace out the effects of his misconduct on the security and welfare of the United States.
In 1833, Justice Joseph Story explained that impeachment is not limited to “crimes of a strictly legal character” but also “has a more enlarged operation, and reaches, what are aptly termed political offenses, growing out of personal misconduct or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, various in their character, and so indefinable in their actual involutions, that it is almost impossible to provide systematically for them by positive law.” This is a near-perfect description of Trump’s wide-ranging abuses and the challenge that now lies with Congress: the order that the positive law is unable to provide is now its to impose.
The pack of second and third rate power-mongers making up the GOP contingent in Congress are not nearly statesmen or stateswomen; they are political creatures who seem incapable of the view that the security of the United States comes first, and the satisfaction of their craven egos is a far distant second. I say that as an independent who has watched them deny anything – ANYTHING – that might constitute a reality they should not breach, be it climate change, banking regulations proven through 70 years of efficacy, or the belief that guns belong in the hands of the mentally ill.
But if they wish to honestly serve their country and accomplish the miracle I mentioned above, then if impeachment results in the loss of their seats due to the extremism of the current GOP base, so be it – this is the result of the abuse of the conservative element of our populace for the last twenty or thirty years by Fox News and other news sources that have failed to serve them with the full breadth of the news, that coddled them, that responded positively to their prejudices, often in the pursuit of self-enrichment.
So I appreciate their detailed, convincing case – but I doubt Speaker Ryan and his cohorts will be doing anything about it soon.
