Friday, January 31, 2020

That "High Bar" Is In the Eye of the Beholder


There is no judicial interpretation of what "high crimes and misdemeanors" means.  Equally, there is no historical precedent for what qualifies as an "impeachable offense" serious enough to warrant the removal of a sitting President from office.  The grounds, the act of conviction, the fact of removal from office, is always political:  and that always means that, as long as the majority in the Senate is of the same party as the President, no President will ever be removed from office by Senatorial action.  Conversely, any removal of a President by the opposite party majority would be permanently stained as a "partisan" action.  Unless the President shot someone on 5th Avenue at high noon.  Well, even then....

So it would seem the impeachment language of Arts. I and II of the Constitution is ever and always a nullity.  Lamar Alexander (who was never going to be our national savior.  Who ever thought he was?  Because he knew Howard Baker?  Please.) hasn't done anything untoward, except to eliminate the postponement of the inevitable.  Despite the eloquence of Adam Schiff, the fix was in.  It's baked into American history, it's baked into the system and its need for stability.  I remember when Nixon resigned, and frankly everything went wobbly.  Ford was his successor only because the Senate had approved him as the replacement VP because Agnew had to resign and face criminal charges.  Ford is the only unelected U.S. President in our history.  We pass over that now, but at the time it was (and still is) the most legitimate "Constitutional crisis" in the country since the Civil War.  Ford was the President, but in a country accustomed to direct election of Senators (not the norm until after 1913; Nixon resigned a mere 60 years after that.  I've been around for 60 years now; if you haven't yet, you probably will be, too.  That looked like an age ago to me; 40 years ago.  Now....), it was unsettling to have the President be selected by the Senate and by happenstance (however Constitutional it all was).  There were probably two basic reasons Ford was never elected:  his status on taking office, and his pardon of Nixon.  People resented the pardon; but Ford represented a break in Presidential selection that couldn't, in the end, be ratified.

But would Nixon have been removed from office?  I don't know that it was inevitable, so much as Howard Baker and others in the Senate wanted to avoid the question.  They didn't want to remove Nixon (who, remember, had won by a landslide unprecedented in American history.  The only state McGovern carried was Massachusetts.), but they didn't want to face down public sentiment, after months of public hearings and the release of the tapes (I used to have a paperback copy of the transcripts), on top of revelations like the Pentagon Papers (had a copy of those, too) and just general declining support for the war (which still hadn't ended) and even rapid judgments by the Supreme Court on what Nixon had to reveal, and to whom (imagine that today, if you can).  They removed Nixon to stop the bleeding, and they did it without having to take responsibility for it.  Would the Senate have actually convicted him?  They didn't want to face that dilemma.  Had they done so, it would have strengthened the impeachment power of the Congress, a power that has never been used and probably won't be used again for a generation or two.

Alexander's position is ultimately a willful act of blindness.  There's a convenience in the stance that, taking all the information and assuming it to be true, there is still no impeachable offense.  All the information is not available, because the Trump administration has so successfully stonewalled Congress (aided and abetted by the Roberts court; even the Burger court was not so happy to be a handmaiden to autocracy).  By declaring no evidence could change his mind, he obviates the need for more evidence, which would certainly change the public's mind, and not toward exoneration.  But that willful blindness is a part of the system.  Removal of a  President IS a negation of an electoral outcome.  Why, frankly, would any Senate want to take responsibility for that?  Then again, when the body politic elects a President who threatens the very governmental system itself, when that President is so corrupt he defies the oversight of the system, and the system accepts that corruption (as the Supreme Court has done), what part of the system will save the people from such corruption?

The people themselves; apparently.

Yeah; we're screwed.
I understand there's gambling in this establishment, too.
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