I more-or-less promised that I would write something about
impeachment. And so I shall. In particular, I shall
explore whether there are grounds for impeachment based on what we
already know.
I'll say right up front: my gut feeling is that there are. We
could, in principle, impeach the president without waiting for
investigative results: all the needed facts are lying in plain
view. Those facts, if viewed correctly, supply good grounds for
impeachment, and removal from office, of President Trump.
Note that when I say "good grounds," I mean that impeachment (and
removal ...) would be justified, in a legal / constitutional sense,
and in the light of the threats which a continued Trump presidency
pose to our nation. Whether impeachment and removal would be
politically possible, or politically advisable at this time, are
separate questions.
But even given that limitation on what I would try to show -- that
impeachment is legally justifiable, not that it is also politically
advisable -- I am not going to prove that this is so, or even attempt
to. The most that I will do is to give an idea of what a valid
argument for impeachment might look like. A sample argument,
let's say ... and to make it easier to understand, let's base it on a
simplified version of the real-world facts.
Before even starting to develop my sample argument, let's look at a
preliminary question: what kinds of things can be grounds for
impeachment? Under our Constitution, Congress can't throw the
president out because of just any presidential action of which it
disapproves. So if not all kinds of "bad decisions" are grounds
for impeachment, what kinds are?
I referred, above, to "... the threats which a continued Trump
presidency pose to our nation." There are many such threats, of
various kinds. For purposes of impeachment, though, I would
focus on one kind: threats to the Constitution.
"Threat to the Constitution" is a hackneyed phrase, these days, but
what does it actually mean? Here's a partial answer, for free:
it does not refer to a danger that someone will break open the vault
holding the official copy of the Constitution, and burn it.
(There is no "official copy." The original of the
document is kept in secure storage, but that is because of its
historic, and symbolic, value; the possibility of its destruction is
not a "threat to the Constitution" in the relevant sense.)
If that's not what we mean by a threat to the Constitution, then what
is? I suggest that the phrase refers to a threat to the
functioning of the Constitution; that is, to the functioning
of the United States government (and state governments ...) in
accordance with the [United States] Constitution.
With that much said, I can begin to describe my "sample argument" for
impeachment: a hypothetical example of presidential conduct that would
constitute a threat to the Constitution. Except that, in the
example chosen, it's not exactly that the president's
actions are the threat: the original threat comes from
outside. But the president's conduct makes the threat worse.
Suppose that some foreign country (unnamed, because this is a
hypothetical example) were engaged in intensive efforts to undermine
the functioning of our Constitution. These efforts, we suppose,
are ongoing, and they have multiple goals. Sometimes they are
directed at causing a specific candidate to win an election. At
other times, the goal is more diffuse (but just as toxic): to increase
polarization, and thereby increase mutual distrust, in the American
population. Hitting a home run, in respect to this latter sort
of goal, would consist of pushing our nation into at least a partial
state of anarchy.
Some readers, at this point, might be bursting to say: "How can you
stand there with your teeth in your mouth and call this a
'hypothetical example'? It's just like our real, current
situation!"
Ah, but I haven't finished describing the example yet. Here's
how it differs from the SCR (Sad Current Reality): in the SCR,
something additional is alleged: that the current president, or
members of his posse, actually "colluded" (whatever that means) with
the hostile foreign power in question. And because of the
sensational nature of that second accusation, discussion has focused
mostly on it, and less attention is being given to the underlying
issue of the foreign interference itself.
Suppose that were not the case. Suppose that there was no
suspicion at all that the president, or any of his associates, were in
any way complicit with the foreign interference. The foreigners
were doing it entirely on their own.
On the other hand, the hypothetical situation, let us stipulate, is
also similar to the real one (as I see it) in some ways. For one
thing, suppose that no reasonable person doubts that foreign attempts
at interference are happening, and are having some effect. There
is no indication that the actual counting of votes was (successfully)
tampered with, in the last general election, but it does seem clear
that it was attempted.
And suppose that we also know, because our intelligence professionals
tell us so, that these pesky foreigners planted a lot of false stories
(while making those stories appear to have come from Americans) on
social media (and sometimes in other media as well). It is
impossible to know whether or not anyone, as a result of their
exposure to these false stories, voted differently from the way he or
she otherwise would have. But it's certainly possible, and we
can't even conclusively rule out the possibility that the overall
results would have been different.
If you were living in this alternative reality, and were aware of
these foreign efforts to influence our political process, I suspect
that you would be concerned about them. You might even go so far
as to declare that what these bad people across the water are doing
constitutes a threat to our Consitution. And your next thought
might be: "Our government needs to doing something about this!"
Just for example: remember that the bad guys made some effort to hack
into the computer systems that actually count the votes. We're
confident that these systems were not actually compromised, but if
Boris and Natasha are working on improving their techniques, the
outcome next time might be different. Clearly this calls for a
major effort on our part to improve the security of these
systems. Or so, I suspect, you would be inclined to think.
Here we learn that an Alternate Reality can be Sad, just like the
Current Reality. For it turns out that, in the SAR we are
looking at, this major "secure the systems" effort is just not
happening. Some states may be trying to do something about it on
their own, but there is no nationwide coordination: nothing from the
federal level.
Why not? Well, to do this right would require cooperative
efforts by multiple agencies of the federal government. And
successful interagency cooperation on this level hardly ever happens
without active leadership by the President of the United States.
And as hard as it may be to imagine this, those active efforts by the
POTUS, in this SAR, are ... just not happening.
To strain your credulity even further, here's something even
more odd. The hypothetical president is not just refraining from
issuing the needed hypothetical orders. He is even, from time to
time, doing things that could be reasonably expected to impede
whatever security efforts the various agencies are putting forward on
their own.
No, he's not calling up agency heads and demanding that they
stop. Not that we know of, anyway. What he is doing, quite
publicly, is letting it be known that he is not convinced that the
foreign efforts at interference even exist.
His way of doing this varies from day to day, based on
... something. (His mood? Who knows?) Sometimes he
just mutters that he has doubts, or that the denials by the foreign
leader sound sincere to him. At other times, he is more
assertive, declaring that all the accounts of such foreign efforts to
interfere in our political processes are nothing but -- are you ready
for this? -- a "hoax." Perpetrated by the "fake" mainstream
media, no less.
As some alert readers may have noticed, if you put together the right
pieces out of what I have said, above, I may seem to be imagining a
world in which the president of the US is not a "reasonable
person." What a notion! But bear with me, please.
Thinking about an imaginary situation, even such a far-fetched one as
this, can sometimes tell us useful things, things that we can bring
back and apply in the real world.
After that pause for reassurance, let's review where we are.
You, dear reader, have (willingly, I trust) imagined yourself into the
role of an American citizen in a bizarre alternate reality. In
that reality, you have learned, the leaders of a foreign country
(still unnamed) have caused their minions to do some nasty things
which (it has, by now, become clear) pose a threat to the effective
functioning of our constitutional system. Furthermore, our
president is not, as you might expect, throwing his leadership
abilities into thwarting these nefarious plans. Indeed, he
sometimes complains about the efforts to thwart them, saying that
certain misguided officials are wasting their time in fighting an
imaginary threat.
You, on the other hand, are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that
the threat is not imaginary. Therefore, you reluctantly conclude
that the president's conduct -- the combination of inaction, and
sometimes active discouragement of efforts to combat it -- are
materially increasing the threat. Or in other words, the
president's conduct is materially increasing the risk that our
constitutional system of government will break down.
Faced with all that, what would you do? I think you might begin
to wonder whether this peculiar conduct on the part of the US
president constituted grounds for impeachment and removal from office.
At this point in my discourse (if not sooner), an argumentative person
seated in the peanut gallery can contain herself no longer. "You
fraud!" she says. "You are pretending that all you are talking
about is an alternate reality. That serves to induce the reader
to lower her guard, so that it is easier to suggest to her that she
'would,' if she were in that reality, start thinking about
impeachment.
"But what you are really trying to do, without admitting it, is to
convince the reader that there are good grounds for impeachment (not
just in the alternate reality, but) in the real world. After
all, the reader might come to the conclusion that the 'hypothetical
example' differs from the real world in only one significant way: by
the fact that, in the real world, the president is also
suspected of active collusion with the enemy.
"Now either you believe those additional charges, or you don't.
If they are false, then there is actually no significant
difference between the alternate reality and the real one. If
there is no significant difference in the facts, and if impeachment
is warranted in the alternate reality, then it is also warranted in
the real one.
"On the other hand, if the charges of active collusion are true, that
can only make the grounds for impeachment stronger, not weaker.
So either way -- whether the president is also guilty of active
collusion, or not -- if there are sufficient grounds for impeachment
in the alternate reality, then there are also sufficient grounds for
impeachment in the real one.
"So," the lady in the peanut gallery concludes, "if the reader accepts
your argument that there are good grounds for impeachment in the
imagined example, then (she may not realize it at first, but) she
logically is required also to accept that there are good grounds for
impeachment in the real world."
Well, alrighty then! How do I respond to that?
I hope I would remember to begin by thanking her for sharing her
closely reasoned thoughts. Perhaps I would continue by saying
that what she suggests is a novel idea, one I hadn't thought of.
And so, I will need some time to think about it before I can be sure,
but at first blush it sounds like her main argument may very well be correct.
If that turns out to be the case, then I will quarrel with only one
part of what she said: her assumption that I was deliberately trying
to mislead, rather than unintentionally leading the reader in the
direction of a final conclusion which had simply not occurred to me.
However, when I claimed that it never occurred to me, possibly I was
lying. Were that to be the case, then everything that the peanut
gallery lady said would be true.
Okay, all kidding aside. It seems that I have laid out, shall we
say, a scaffolding of an argument in favor of the impeachment, and
removal from office, of President Donald Trump. But a
scaffolding is not a finished structure: let me be the first to admit
that I have not proven my case.
That is true on several levels, beginning with the facts. I have
said a number of things about the president's conduct.
Originally I presented them as hypothetical "stipulations" ("Let's
suppose ...."); eventually I admitted that I believed them to be true
in the real world. But my saying so is not likely to be
sufficient to convince two-thirds of the Senate. Nor should it
be.
The same goes for the conclusions that I drew about the likely effects
of that conduct. I said that there was a real danger that the
foreign efforts would undermine the functioning of our system of
government. I further claimed that the president's lack of
positive action to meet this threat, along with repeated claims by him
that the threat is imaginary, could be expected to produce a net
increase in the level of this risk: to make it worse, I'd go so far as
to say, than if he had done nothing about it at all. But to all
of this, it would be perfectly reasonable to respond: Prove it!
Now suppose that all of that were proven. There would
still be questions about the intent, and/or causes, of the president's
actions (including his inaction). To begin with, one might
wonder whether he sincerely believed that the threat was
imaginary. And if he did, one might well wonder how on earth
that came about. Depending on the answers to those questions,
one might construe his conduct as anything from malicious to merely
incompetent.
However, it could also be claimed that the answers to those questions
about intent, while interesting, are irrelevant. Not relevant,
that is, to the end in view, which is to decide whether there is
justification for removing the president from office.
That question about relevance is part of a larger question, which is
actually the remaining question, once we suppose the actions,
and their consequences, to have been proved. Given the actions
and the consequences, and given that the consequences are (at least
potentially) very bad for the country, it still remains to ask: does
all of this rise to the level of an "impeachable offense"? Does
it fit under the heading of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes
and Misdemeanors"?
So there we are. I think I have proven that I have not proven my
case; to put that in a possibly less confusing way, I hope I have
convinced you that the case for impeachment is not proven by what I
have said so far. We may have some promising ingredients, but
there is a good deal of mixing, and seasoning, and cooking yet to be
done. What we have so far hardly qualifies as "instant
impeachment (just add legalese)."
If there's all that work left to be done, then, you might think,
clearly my next step should be to get on with it. But I'm not
going to do that. Not in this journal entry, nor the next; in
fact, not in the currently foreseeable future.
Why not? There are multiple answers to that question.
There are so many answers that I expect my entire next journal entry
to be devoted to providing them.
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