07/31/2007 07:29:45 AM EST
What is impeachment?
posted by Shoeless Doc
There is something terribly amiss in our national conversation about impeachment. The American people, many of our congressional representatives, and in particular the Democratic leadership, appear to be functioning under the misperception that impeachment is merely an indictment – a complaint forwarded to the Senate for trial in anticipation of conviction and removal. This is a dangerous misconception that materially weakens our constitution.
The Framers of the United States Constitution were amongst the most literate men in history, and each and every word of the Constitution was chosen with painful care. These men did not mean indictment when they wrote impeachment six times in our constitution. The two words were not at all synonymous in 1787. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 was the authoritative reference work on the English language used by the Framers. Jefferson himself recommended this volume. It defined Impeachment as follows: "1. To hinder; to impede. […] 2. To accuse by publick [sic] authority." The sense of these two merge to make it plain that impeachment was seen as an end in itself. Its effect: to hinder and impede the offending executive officer or magistrate; to reassert congressional prerogatives in the historical record; and to expose the bad acts of the official to public scrutiny and commentary.
Although impeachment is prerequisite for trial and removal by the Senate, the two processes are constitutionally distinct and serve very different purposes. They must not be conflated. The relative ease of impeachment, when compared to the very high bar for removal, makes it abundantly clear that the Framers intended impeachment to be used with some regularity, while removal should be difficult and rare. This turns the current general understanding of impeachment on its head. Removal may be a consequence of impeachment, but it is not, and cannot be its goal. To make a high likelihood of removal a prerequisite for impeachment is exactly backwards. Nevertheless, that idea, a logical absurdity, is one of the principal excuses we hear for the Democratic leadership’s impotence.
The other excuse is that impeachment will “suck the oxygen” out of the Democratic legislative agenda. In reality, sidestepping impeachment will not allow Democrats to sidestep the barriers of Senate filibuster and presidential veto. The Republicans are already crowing about how the Democratic legislative agenda is dead. The Republicans intend wholesale obstructionism for the duration of the 110th Congress, and the Senate is on course to triple the number of filibusters in any previous congress. Post offices and public buildings will be named (20 of 48 bills signed by Bush since 1/2007), but little substantive legislation will ever be signed into law. So far, all the Democrats have achieved is a minimal increase in the minimum wage at the cost of prolonging the Iraqi occupation against the will of the American and Iraqi people – a pathetic consolation prize for a failure of congressional will. Continue on this course and the Democratic agenda will hang in abeyance and expire with the close of the110th congress.
Meanwhile, congress, the law and the American people are shown the greatest contempt by this administration – officials refusing to appear under subpoena; the mocking contempt of the Senate Judiciary Committee by A.G. Gonzales, whose transparent perjury bespeaks the certainty of a future pardon; mendacity of the highest order, and an assertion of executive privilege spanning unprecedented breadth. When Ms Pelosi took impeachment off the table, she invited the Administration to continue its overreaching grab for "unitary" executive power – a power our founders would have labeled despotic. That is what the American people have already witnessed while, at the Speaker’s discretion, the congress stands confused and powerless.
Like President Bush, Speaker Pelosi needs to change course. Like Bush, Pelosi is stubbornly holding on to a failed policy. Like Bush, Pelosi is showing dangerous arrogance rather than respect for and duty to our constitution. Nancy Pelosi has an immense power at her disposal: she can stop enabling this reckless and power-grasping administration, and she can stop arming her Republican opponents with ammunition to illuminate and decry the weakness of congressional Democrats. Impeachment is mentioned six times in our constitution. It is the prescribed remedy for the cancer that now spreads throughout the body politic and threatens the people’s liberty.
Speaker Pelosi must reconsider impeachment in the context our Framers intended. The strength of our Democratic Republic rests in adherence to our Constitution, and impeachment is the explicit constitutional remedy for the crisis that now engulfs our nation. We must re-educate ourselves, and the American people at large on why we impeach – not to remove, but to restrain and expose.
