Impeachment Lessons
The Nineties taught us it’s not guilt that matters; it’s political will.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
December 7, 2013 4:00 AM
Well whaddya know: The topic of impeachment reared its head at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Jonathan Strong’s report here at NRO noted the wincing consternation of GOP-leadership aides at utterances of the “i-word” during the testimony of prominent legal experts. For the Republican establishment, it seems, history begins and ends in the 1990s: No matter how times have perilously changed, any talk of shutdowns or impeachment is bad, bad, bad. Yes, the Obama “uber-presidency,” as left-of-center law professor Jonathan Turley called it, has enveloped the nation in what he conceded is “the most serious constitutional crisis . . . of my lifetime,” but GOP strategists would just as soon have us chattering about immigration “reform” and bravely balancing the federal budget by, oh, around 2040.
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It is beyond cavil that the president is willfully undermining the constitutional system that he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. He presumes to rewrite, and dramatically alter, the laws he vowed to execute faithfully — not once in a blue moon but as a deliberate scheme of governance.
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“High crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitution’s standard for impeachment, are the misdeeds of high officials — what Hamilton referred to as abuses of the “public trust,” violations of a “political” nature in the sense that “they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
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Impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. Thus the quasi-legal component — proving high crimes and misdemeanors — is the easy part. As a practical matter, fundamental transformation cannot occur without high crimes and misdemeanors being committed against the constitutional order that is being transformed. That’s the whole point.
So, as one would expect, President Obama is intentionally and sweepingly violating his oath of office. He is not faithfully executing federal law — he picks, chooses, “waives,” and generally makes up law as he goes along. He has willfully and materially misled the American people — his Obamacare and Benghazi lies being only the most notorious examples.
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As things now stand, the public is not convinced. There is no political will to remove the president.
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