We are approaching our version of the Rubicon (a shallow river in northern Italy) that was the symbolic border of the Roman Republic. When Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, the Roman Republic dissolved as Caesar became the Emperor of the Roman Empure. Thus, representative government was replaced by a dictatorship. If this is a (fair & balanced) warning that the United States of America will be ruled by The LK (Lyin' King) and his cult in a distatorship, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Impeachment Process Is Barely Functioning
By Elizabeth Drew
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
When the process of impeachment drove President Richard Nixon from office in 1974, there was widespread celebration that “the system worked.” But the 1974 impeachment process may turn out to have been unique, a model for how it should work that has yet to be replicated — and perhaps never will be.
The current proceedings have demonstrated how fragile the Constitution’s impeachment clause is. The idea of the clause was to hold a president accountable for misdeeds between elections; but it’s now clearer than ever that it doesn’t work very well in the context of a very partisan political atmosphere.
That’s because the founders didn’t anticipate political parties, or “factions,” much less the power they would gain. James Madison [or Alexander Hamilton?] pointed out in Federalist No. 51 that men aren’t angels, and so there needed to be a check on a president’s power — in addition to the voters’ decision every four years. In 1974, the constitutional system held while a president tried to assert, unsuccessfully, that he wasn’t accountable to Congress or the courts. But now the impeachment process is barely functioning, and it’s not difficult to envision it breaking down completely.
Today, there’s a president who feels free to completely stonewall an impeachment inquiry. Even Nixon did not deem the entire process illegitimate. Yes, he tried to hold back damning recordings of Oval Office conversations, but when he was overruled by the Supreme Court he turned the tapes over to Congress. He also held back some documents from the House Judiciary Committee — an act that formed the basis of an article [PDF] of impeachment against him. But he allowed his aides to appear before the Senate Watergate Committee, helping to seal his own doom.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has forbidden his aides from appearing before the House investigative committees (some lower-level aides appeared of their own volition). Mr. Trump also went well beyond Nixon — who was no sweetheart — in lashing out personally at the major figures working toward his impeachment. Mr. Trump’s closest allies in the Senate, in particular the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have also brought pressure, at least of the verbal kind, on Senate Republicans to vote against conviction (which would drive the president from office).
It is, of course, not surprising that impeachment should be a highly partisan affair. It’s difficult to contemplate the investigations of Nixon, President Bill Clinton and now Mr. Trump ever commencing if the same party held the House and the White House.
But today’s partisanship is more intense than ever. In 1974, as many as seven Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee broke with Nixon — and the fact that a number of Republican senators were willing to convict him led him to resign. Today, such unorthodoxy is heresy among Republicans. No defections by Republicans are expected when the full House votes on impeachment in the coming week, and perhaps at most a tiny number in the Senate when the case goes to trial, probably early next year.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, expects that there will be at least a handful of Democratic defectors when the full House votes on the articles. Reportedly, more than a dozen of the 31 Democrats who won in districts that went for Mr. Trump in 2016 don’t want to risk losing their seats by riling up Mr. Trump and his supporters in 2020, and this group has had Ms. Pelosi’s ear. (By her own estimate, she can lose 17 votes and have the House adopt the articles.)
Most of the more moderate House Democrats (in recruiting the class of 2018 Ms. Pelosi put a lot of emphasis on finding veterans to run) initially opposed the idea of impeachment. They were galvanized only after the leadership convinced them that Mr. Trump’s withholding military assistance to Ukraine while it was fighting off a Russian invasion was a matter of national security. The unusual step of having the Intelligence Committee instead of the Judiciary Committee run the impeachment inquiry was also engineered to calm those moderate Democrats, who feared that the liberals on the Judiciary Committee would run wild.
That same group of moderates wanted the articles kept as narrow as possible, and they got their wish. On Friday, the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee approved two articles. One charges that Mr. Trump abused his power by withholding military assistance to Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to examine an already debunked theory of Russian origin about alleged Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election, and to at least announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, who served on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas company. The second article holds Mr. Trump in contempt of Congress for his absolute refusal to cooperate in the impeachment investigation.
According to members of the Judiciary Committee, a number of committee Democrats wanted a more expansive set of articles. Some wanted to add an article taking Mr. Trump to task for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Some argued for a far more expansive indictment of Mr. Trump for abuse of power. A few wanted articles to reflect the president’s alleged violations of campaign finance laws by concealing hush money payments to two women with whom he’d had sexual relations after his marriage to Melania. (Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is in prison for abetting those payments.) And several Democrats wanted to add some of the evidence gathered by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Mr. Trump might have obstructed justice by trying to shut down Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
But Ms. Pelosi and her close ally, Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and a fellow Californian, didn’t want to re-raise the matter of Russia’s role in the 2016 election. They argued that they should stick with matters on which the facts were clear and that pertained to national security.
This left the more liberal Judiciary Committee members — the majority — less than happy. One committee Democrat had told me that if the liberals didn’t win additional charges, they could bring them up later. But barring something extraordinary happening, it seems highly unlikely that the Democrats would undergo another impeachment exercise in 2020.
I asked Mr. Schiff during the Judiciary Committee’s deliberations about the concern of many Democrats that by limiting the articles of impeachment to Ukraine, the Democrats were by implication saying that other Trump misdeeds were acceptable.
“I think that that’s very much a legitimate concern,” he replied. “The president has engaged in other misconduct, but I felt that the most egregious misconduct was in pressuring an ally.” The charges in the two articles was “the case that we can prove today.”
He added that work on other matters relating to Mr. Trump’s ethical conduct “will continue.” The last thing he wants to happen, he said, is to allow Mr. Trump to invite foreign intervention in another election.
What, then, are we learning about Congress’s ability to check a wayward president? One can conclude that in our highly polarized world, a strong-willed president like Mr. Trump can limit impeachment — and possibly wreck it.
Had a whistle-blower not raised concerns, and had those brave State Department witnesses not testified before Congress despite the president’s admonitions not to, the House Democrats would have had too little validation for their effort to bring charges. And then, because Mr. Trump’s hold over Senate Republicans seems almost cultlike, he is all but certain to be acquitted at the trial early next year.
What checks, then, remain? The unwieldy 25th Amendment, which essentially relies on the vice president to initiate the process of removal, is no real alternative, unless a president is near comatose.
That means that unless our political system undergoes a radical change, we could be on the brink of having no check on the president, no matter how radically he defies the Constitution. ###
[Elizabeth Drew is a political journalist and author who was the Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly (1967–1973) and The New Yorker (1973–1992). She was a panelist for "Meet the Press" for many years and made frequent appearances on the "PBS News Hour" when it was presented by Jim Lehrer and still occasionally appears on "The NewsHour" and other radio and television programs. Drew has written 14 books and her book on Watergate and the end of the Nixon presidency — Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall first appeared in 1974 and was republished in 2015. She received a BA as a Phi Beta Kappainitiate (political science) from Wellesley College (MA).]
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