As the impeachment process plays out, the 2020 presidential election grows ever closer. Up until recently even many of Trump’s detractors asserted that because the election is so close, Trump should not be impeached. The infamous Ukraine call changed the view of some on this matter, but Trump’s defenders still use this argument. Some also argue that impeachment would overturn the 2016 election and thus should not be done. There are thus matters to be considered—whether impeachment should not occur when an election is close and whether impeachment wrongly overturns an election.
As Trump’s defenders rightly note, Trump was elected president. As his detractors note, he lost the popular vote by a large margin. The impeachment process could result in Trump being removed from office and one could claim that this would overturn the election. But this would be an error.
First there is the obvious point that impeachment is in the constitution and thus is intended to be an option—if the founders saw it as a wrongful overturning of elections, they would have presumably not included it. While the Republicans praise the wisdom of the founders when it matches their agenda of the moment, the founds were but men and could be wrong.
Second, the purpose of impeachment is to remove a person from office who has committed misdeeds that warrant removal. This is not to say that impeachment cannot be abused, but to reject impeachment because someone might abuse it would be analogous to rejecting criminal courts because they might be abused by some judge. It is not the process but the abuse of the process that would be a problem. If this Republican defense worked, then they would have just proven that they were wrong to impeach Bill Clinton and have shown that no one (even a Democrat) should ever be impeached in the future. I suspect that those advancing this defense of Trump would not apply it to Clinton or a future Democrat but I could be wrong about that—perhaps they have a strong and abiding commitment to the principle that impeachment is always wrong because the person being impeached was elected.
Third, an analogy can be used to show that this defense is flawed. If the principle is that when a decision is made by people to select someone for a position, that person should never be removed until the time comes to again select for that position, then no one should ever be fired, and no one should ever be divorced. This is clearly absurd. Now, what about the upcoming election defense?
It could be argued that with an election coming up, the people should get to decide whether the president remains in office or not. One challenge here is sorting out a time limit for this. Trump has over a year left in his term, so if the defense holds now, then a president would be immune to impeachment for about 25% of their term. This seems odd. If the president is justly impeachable, allowing them a year (or even a month) to continue to engage in misdeeds seems wrong and harmful.
Consider the following analogy. Suppose that Hillary is hired by the board to be the CEO of a corporation. In her contract, she will be up for review in four years. Hillary engages in misdeeds, including efforts to corrupt the review process. Imagine that the corporation has a policy that allows such CEOs to be removed for bad behavior, but Hillary insists that terminating her before then would overturn the vote of the board, so she should be allowed to stay and to continue her subversion of the voting process and commit even more misdeeds. This is absurd and would merely allow her more time to commit crimes and work on unjustly keeping her position. The same holds true for Trump.
As another example, imagine a professor who is using their position to extort favors from students. They are caught, but the university says that since they are up for tenure review in a year, they should not be fired—this matter will be sorted out by the vote of the tenure committee. This is also absurd—even if the vote is coming up the next day, these misdeeds should be addressed. The same applies to Trump.
Thus, the election defense of Trump has no merit. This also holds true for any other president—even a Democrat.
Mike, do you really believe that Trump is the first president to use foreign aid to “extort” other countries to perform certain actions?
You’re meeting him half way on this. Why? Where is the evidence that Trump “extorted” anything? The whole thing is bullshit, as I just stated in an earlier post. Why allow Mike, even in his small and insignificant way, to move the Overton window? Stop letting the left win by surrendering the language. Again, my previous post. Or 80% of my posts in general, one way or the other.
I was hoping that it would gradually dawn on Mike that nations have always used carrots and sticks on each other, and that prior to Trump this has been called “diplomacy” or “foreign affairs” rather than “extortion.”
Understand. But still you’re presuming that something might “dawn on Mike”. Not gonna happen. Groundhog Day, over and over and over again. The only question of merit in this entire charade of this being a “philosopher’s” blog, given the arguments presented here time and time and time again, the equivocating, the pretending, the evasiveness, the vacillating, the “hands-up-don’t-shoot is not a lie because Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the clown nose, is what is the area of the intersection of dishonesty and stupidity. And why, oh why oh why, are the taxpayers expected to continue to subsidize the kind of nonsense that is destroying the greatest civilization in the 10,000 or whatever years of human history?
Can someone please at least address this? I understand the answer may take some work, but the journey of a thousand miles requires at least an initial step.
I, for one, would like to know everything that was going on in Ukraine as it pertains to the U.S. government in the past few years. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Manafort, Crowdstrike, the Bidens. Let it all hang out.
BTW it used to be “the Ukraine” but now it just seems to be “Ukraine.” Does anybody know why this changed?
As referenced in the past it was considered more of a region than a country. Like the steppes or the Caucasus. Looking it up now, “ukraine” means something like “border lands” or “frontier”. I presume “The Netherlands” has similar etymology. When Ukraine broke more formally from the USSR they requested that style guides be changed to drop the “the” to emphasize their independence.
I think that if you’re looking at the intent of the Constitution (I say this with a little snicker, thinking of your comment “the Republicans praise the wisdom of the founders when it matches their agenda of the moment”) I’d say you are correct. The impeachment process allows for the removal of the president when he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, or has violated the public trust – and it is not meant to be taken lightly.
But I’m not sure this process has ever been used in the way it was intended – and certainly not now. The impeachment process against Trump, as has been well noted, began on election night, and arose out of anything but “high crimes and misdemeanors”. The man hadn’t even taken office yet. You know that US politics have reached a new level of absurdity when a Democratic congressional hopeful can win with the campaign “Impeach the Motherfucker!” (Whatever happened to “Happy Days Are Here Again?)
Our legal system has always been predicated on the presumption of innocence – at least in theory. Not so in this context. For Trump, the process has been predicated on, “There’s gotta be something! Keep looking!”
And all along, there has been the rift in the party, with Nancy Pelosi standing firmly against her fellow Democrats, refusing to move forward with the process. Not because she didn’t want to get rid of him in whatever way possible – but because she was protecting her party, playing politics – which is what this is all about anyway.
“Calm down”, she says, “We have to think about how this will affect us. Don’t think about that high moral ground of “right vs wrong” or “crime and punishment”. Don’t be ridiculous. We have a lot of skeletons in our closets too – do we want to open doors that will shine the light of day on us, too? Or, on a more practical note, if we are committed to the process, is there a chance it may backfire on us? How will this affect the midterm elections? How will this affect 2020?”
I think Trump has a very strong point here. He claims that this impeachment process is very much about 2020, and it is based on the fear that the Democrats have a very weak cohort of hopefuls with extreme, implausible, and impossible agendas – and that despite the visceral hatred so many Americans have for Trump they may just vote for him anyway. The Democrats cannot challenge him on policy. Taxes are low, unemployment is low, GDP is high, manufacturing and production are up – his record on real issues that affect the Americans in the “flyover” states that Democrats abhor is very strong.
In contrast, we have two old white guys and a woman who claims to be part Indian, racing against each other on the basis of who can promise to give the most away. Scratch the surface on any of their economic platforms – free college, guaranteed income, single payer health insurance, “tax the rich” – and you’ll see mostly either a gross distortion or complete lack of understanding of even the simplest economic principles. Even the issue of climate change, for all the fanning of the flames, is not helping them. People are very big on “We have to save the Planet!” but not so much if it means they have to give up their AC or their F-150. And when you get right down to it, the focus really has to be on emotion and panic. It can’t be on “Look how well our solutions are working” because, well, they aren’t.
But back to politics. The Democrats and other Never-Trumpers made no attempt to hide their objection to the 2016 election, and their intent to get rid of Trump in whatever way possible was made crystal clear. To me, this casts a HUGE shadow of doubt on ANY allegation of impropriety On the one side, you had a majority of the party screaming for impeachment from day one, hoping that this could be accomplished on the basis of – well, anything. Throw it against the wall, see what sticks, throw it again. Russia, Mueller, Ukraine – racism, White Supremacy, tweets … And on the other hand is Pelosi, keeping a watchful eye on what she knows to be true in American politics. Too soon, America will tire of it. Too late, well, too late. This is timed perfectly – and they don’t even care if any of the allegations are true or not. They are playing a game that they hope will peak on D-Day, Nov. 3. They know they don’t even have to be successful – they don’t have to convict. It’s a strategy.
There is no doubt in my mind that this strategy would be far different if the Democrats had a strong candidate with a solid, workable platform. “Let’s wait” they’d all say, “Let the American People decide”.
Never ask a question in court that you don’t know the answer to. And in this cycle, there are no holds barred.
The same was true of Andrew Johnson, by the way. He was a political pawn – a Southern Democrat chosen as Vice President to help bring the South back to the fold – at least for campaign purposes. No one imagined that John Wilkes Booth would make him president. The Radical Republicans in Congress really set a precedent for today’s Democrats – they decided on day one that they would do whatever it took to get rid of him. Of course, with slavery and Black Codes and Southern Democrat racist policies at stake, these guys definitely had the moral high road, but their process was maybe even more devious than today’s. And their intent was no less clear. Ultimately, Johnson was impeached on the basis of his violation of the Tenure of Office Act – exceeding his executive authority by firing Edwin Stanton without gaining the approval of Congress. But what the history books don’t tell us is that the Tenure of Office Act was put in place by the Republican Congress because they knew Johnson, with his hatred of Stanton, would be easily goaded into firing him, setting the wheels of impeachment in motion.
Setting aside the moral question of slavery, the impeachment of Johnson was no different than it is today – based on intense political opposition and abject hatred, nothing more.
Nixon was probably the only one of that group who really deserved to be impeached. The Watergate break-in was clearly a crime, as was his involvement in the subsequent cover-up. And, as was Obama’s a few decades later, so was his criminal use of the IRS against his political enemies.
Later, of course, Obama proved that politics really do matter. He was able to exceed his executive authority pretty routinely, and weaponize the IRS with impunity. He had the race card in his back pocket, which would cause any and all actions against him to backfire in a big way.
We’ll see what happens, I guess. If the case against Trump is weak, maybe Americans will tire of it and vote on what they always vote on – economy, employment, satisfaction. That would suck for the Dems. But maybe, despite what we read in the news and on “A Philosopher’s Blog”, the case really is weak – but the political savvy of Nancy Pelosi will save the day and President Warren will have the chance to undermine the economy herself. That might suck for the Republicans, but then again, it might do for them what Carter did in the 1970’s.
But don’t kid yourself. Crime and Misdemeanor have nothing to do with this at all.
It’s funny. I was just thinking I should be very critical of Trump. There’s a lot I don’t like about his manner and his policies. And I’m fractionally Left, even by European standards, quite comfortable with Social Democratic politics. (I quite like Bernie Sanders personally. I’ve known men like him, honest, well-meaning, genuine believers in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists – like a young George Orwell who grew old never seeing the inevitable effects of socialism.
But a) Trump has done a surprisingly good job so far, when judged against the issues he ran on and the general success of US presidents in meeting their promises and b) he turns his enemies into such cartoonishly villainous, dishonest, and inept figures that my sympathy can’t be with them.
In this case, I believe you have beaten up that fearsome strawman pretty badly.
Has anybody in the political sphere actually said that impeachment should not be employed in principle because it overturns elections, much less that the time remaining should be a factor? If so, cite please; don’t just smear that across unnamed Republicans.
Many people, on both sides, have mentioned the political fallout from an impeachment. That’s an entirely different thing. I have read articles from Democrats warning that a failed impeachment attempt – and it it is doomed to fail in the Senate – will just create sympathy for Trump, which is not their aim.
In this case also, we have seen calls for impeachment from the start, even before Trump was inaugurated. The “whistleblower’s” (who is clearly and legally not a whistleblower) lawyer tweeted calling for a “coup” and “impeachment” two weeks after inauguration. How does that work? These were clear calls for what you referred to as the abuse of the impeachment power. These are clearly calls to overturn the election by dishonest and corrupt methods.
I look forward to the upcoming ICIG report, and even more, Durham’s investigation. And even more, the inevitable enquiry into the lies and collusion that led to this latest pretense.
Sorry, I meant I look forward to the upcoming DOJ IG’s report.