One of team Trump’s crackpot mantras is that impeachment would “overturn the election.” White House lawyer Pat Cipollone says it’s an “illegitimate” effort to “overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the president they have freely chosen.” House toady Steve Scalise tells Fox News that Trump’s pursuers are “literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” A Trump 2020 campaign ad says “the Democrats are trying to overturn the election…ignore how we voted.”
But the House Intelligence Committee report, released yesterday, makes it abundantly clear – by quoting the Founding Fathers – that impeachment is the constitutional remedy for what Alexander Hamilton called “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men…from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
And never once, not in a single syllable, does the Constitution ever define impeachment as a way to overturn the previous election.
If Republicans were not so tethered to Trump and the Kremlin, they would acknowledge that. If Republicans were still in touch with their previous selves – when they touted themselves as “strict constructionists” who insisted on a literal reading of our founding document – they would agree with the intelligence panel’s report, which points out that impeachment was always “intended to serve as the ultimate form of accountability for a duly-elected president.” (Italics mine.)
Team Trump’s claim that impeachment would overturn the will of “the people” is fatuous for two other reasons: In 2016, “the people” gave Trump nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent; and currently, “the people” – by a margin of 50 to 43 percent – want him impeached and thrown out. Richard Nixon’s poll numbers weren’t that terrible until the eve of his resignation, one step ahead of impeachment.
By the way – I should briefly address this – the House Intelligence Committee’s report is predictably devastating. Thanks to documents and fact-witness testimony that the Trump team barely tried to refute, here’s the gist:
Trump’s abuse of power in Ukraine “was the act of a president who viewed himself as unaccountable and determined to use his vast official powers to secure his reelection…By withholding vital military assistance and diplomatic support from a strategic foreign partner government engaged in an ongoing military conflict illegally instigated by Russia, President Trump compromised national security to advance his personal political interests…
“The President engaged in this course of conduct for the benefit of his own presidential reelection, to harm the election prospects of a political rival, and to influence our nation’s upcoming presidential election to his advantage. In doing so, the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process…
“This continued solicitation of foreign interference in a U.S. election presents a clear and present danger that the President will continue to use the power of his office for his personal political gain.”
In other words, the articles of impeachment won’t focus on the previous election, much less seek to overturn it (because if Trump were ever convicted, his underlings, most notably Mike Pence, would still be in power). Rather, the articles of impeachment will focus on the damage Trump has done while in office, post-election.
I invite everyone to dig into the report’s dirty details – which also feature Biden dirt-digger Rudy Giuliani (making endless phone calls to the White House, and taking calls from the Office of Management and Budget, where the military aid was held up); and failed probe saboteur Devin Nunes, who has now been outed as a phone pal of Rudy goon Lev Parnas. (Nunes on Fox News last night: “It’s very unlikely I’d be taking calls from random people,” which is funny because the phone records obtained by the intelligence panel show him taking calls from Parnas.)
But dirty details aside, I’ll content myself today with the chairman Adam Schiff’s discourse on the legitimacy of impeachment as the “essential check and balance on the authority of the occupant of the Office of the President.” If the Founders had intended impeachment to be a mechanism for overturning the previous election, they would have spelled out the means for holding a new election. They did nothing of the sort. They merely said (Schiff quoting Hamilton) that impeachment should hold presidents accountable for extreme abuses of power, “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
Indeed, President George Washington (he’s quoted, too) warned in his 1797 farewell address that there might come a day when “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
When the House Judiciary Committee drafts the articles of impeachment, Washington will look like a prophet.
If only Alexander Hamilton would prove to be equally prophetic. In Federalist Paper 65, he lauded the U.S. Senate as the most credible locale for an impeached president’s trial. The upper chamber, he confidently wrote, would be “sufficiently dignified…sufficiently independent…unawed and uninfluenced,” with “the necessary impartiality.” Alas, he never could have foreseen Mitch McConnell’s Republican sinkhole, where dear leader fealty reigns supreme, and empirical facts seem destined to circle the drain.