Andrew McCarthy: Dems set new standard, every president now impeachable
Andrew McCarthy explains the Democrats’ "circumstantial" impeachment case and the new precedent they are setting
On impeachment, am I part of the problem? I don’t think so, but it’s a fair question. After all, as I’m frequently reminded on Twitter, particularly by people who clearly did not read the book, I am the author of a little 2014 ditty titled "Faithless Execution — Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment."
I’m proud of the book, but I’ve always had regrets about the subtitle. On books, I strain the brain to come up with a pithy title. Regrettably, subtitles are a staple of the non-fiction biz. I hate them. They attempt to sum up what a book is about in a line catchy enough to interest people in plunking down the sales price.
Often, books on complicated topics cannot be fairly summarized in a line, so even a subtitle that is accurate is apt to be incomplete, and hence misleading. This is a problem, not least because many more people will glance at a book’s cover than will peruse its pages.
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My subtitle told readers that the book was about building the political case for President Obama’s impeachment due to his failure to execute the laws faithfully. This was accurate, but not complete.
The book’s thesis is that (a) impeachment is a political remedy, a precondition for which is the making of a political case that persuades the public that the president should be removed; and (b) unless the public is strongly persuaded, such that two-thirds of the Senate is moved to convict, it would be a mistake for the House to impeach in the first place.
It would be reasonable, then, for a person who just spied the cover of my book to assume I was calling for President Obama’s impeachment. To the contrary, I argued that it would be a mistake for the then-Republican-controlled House to impeach Obama, even if he had committed impeachable offenses and was threatening our constitutional order (as I believed was the case), unless it was plausible that a Senate supermajority would vote to oust him.
I conceded that this was highly unlikely, but that one would never know for sure unless one tried to make the public case. Trying (as I did) to make that case was worth doing irrespective of whether a formal impeachment attempt in the House would ultimately be reasonable; public pressure might induce the president to mend his ways.
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In the Trump impeachment misadventure, I’ve described our conception of impeachment as “bipolar.” This is a leitmotif of faithless execution.
On the one hand, we have an abstract legal understanding of what an impeachable offense is. Derived from British common law and colonial experience, it is best explained by Hamilton in Federalist No. 65.
On the other hand, we have a practical political understanding that an impeachable offense must be so egregious that it justifies going through the upheaval that removing a president necessarily entails. This is also addressed in Federalist No. 65, with Alexander Hamilton observing that impeachment is committed to the Senate rather than a court because it should be decided by a numerous tribunal of statesmen exercising sound judgment, free from the legal constraints that bind prosecutors and judges.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW
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