... but we should fire the poor bastard anyway.

[edelsont]

Just a few things to clarify, in relation to the last post (the one with the subject line, "Pity our underprivileged president ...").

Do I really think we should pity him, or consider him "underprivileged"?  Absolutely.  If you could choose, wouldn't you prefer being mentally privileged, rather than financially so?

What do I mean by "we should fire [him]"?  I mean that the House of Representatives should impeach him, and the Senate should remove him from office.

I've written, in this journal, on the subject of impeachment before.  I made myself sound dubious on the subject.  But I never really said we shouldn't impeach him; only that the time didn't seem right to put energy into promoting the idea.

I think that has changed.  Don't you?

Specifically, I am now prepared to say that it's time to begin impeachment proceedings.

Why?  Well, I won't pretend that a Democratic majority in the House is totally irrelevant to my coming to this conclusion.  But it's not really the reason for it.

Then what is?  I won't attempt a comprehensive, general answer to this (not here and now, at least).  For one thing, new facts have come to light.  Also, other contributors to the public debate have, in the interim, come to the same change in, or clarification of, their positions; I generally agree with their reasoning.

There's really only one [more?] substantive point that I want to make, here, and even that one will be somewhat abbreviated.  I just want to take a shot at answering this question: how can I say that it's time to get to work on firing the poor bastard, when in just the last post, I said that we need to emphasize Donald Trump's incompetence more, and his evil nature less?

Now, why is that even a question?  Because the Constitution has that infamous phrase: a president (or other official) may be impeached for (and, apparently, only for) "high crimes and misdemeanors."

There is nothing like consensus on what, exactly, that phrase means.  Indeed, there may simply be no answer as to exactly what it means.  There does, in my reading, seem to be something close to a consensus on one thing that it doesn't mean: the most respected scholars on the subject seem to agree that an "impeachable offense" is not, always and necessarily, a crime in the penal-code sense.

And yet, and yet.  Those words, "high crimes and misdemeanors," continue to bedevil us.  So, for that matter, does the phrase "impeachable offense" (emphasis added).  These usages nudge us into thinking that valid grounds for impeachment must be something like being guilty of a crime.  In particular, they make us reluctant to think that it would be proper to "fire" someone, under this process, "merely" for incompetence.

And shouldn't we be reluctant to do that?  At this point, the best I can do is to answer the question with a question: how reluctant should we be?  I agree with the intuition that we don't want the House and Senate to feel that they can remove the president whenever they feel like it.  But that doesn't give us a set of criteria, an algorithm that will tell us, or them, when it is Constitutionally proper to take this step.

Maybe it's just not possible to frame a usable set of criteria for this.  Maybe such decisions can only reasonably be made in examining the facts of a concrete case.  Maybe we need to say, today, about "impeachable offense," what I believe a Supreme Court justice did say, years ago, about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."

Essentially, I do believe that.  At least the part about its being impossible to frame an explicit, algorithm-like set of criteria for what constitutes an impeachable offense.  But I also think that there is more that can usefully be said about what would constitute a fair-minded approach to such a decision, in the matter of Donald Trump.

There is more to be said, but I am not prepared to say it now.