Concerning impeachment, our constitution works

How long did it take for a Democratic senator to call for Trump’s impeachment? Eighty-eight days! After only eighty-eight days, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said he supports impeaching Trump. Why? The Georgia Democrat is running scared trying to save his Senate seat.

Ossoff recently appeared before his Democratic constituents and fielded complaints that he wasn’t doing enough to stand against Trump’s policies. The only material thing they can imagine to do to “stand up to Trump” is impeach him.

Ossoff said that he “strongly” supports impeaching Trump, but acknowledged that the Democrats would need to flip the House in order to see the effort through. In case anyone is counting, this would be the third go at impeaching President Trump.

Impeachment has historically meant one of two things: Either it has meant the bringing up of a federal office holder on charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors” by the House of Representatives, or the attempt to discredit political opponents for partisan gain. In either case, impeachment does not equate to removal from office. It is synonymous with “indictment.” A successful impeachment does not mean that conviction is a sure bet. The Senate must render a two-thirds majority vote to convict and remove an officeholder. Trump was impeached twice in his first term but was not convicted either time.

Ossoff knows that impeaching Trump is a tall order, and also doubtless knows that the prospect of the Senate convicting him of actual crimes is even more unlikely. It matters not to Ossoff that throwing impeachment around a town-hall meeting in a bid to jump-start his campaign is nothing more than a cynical attention-grabbing scheme to shore up his own credibility. Such a flippant and baseless tactic is neither imaginative, nor inspiring. It takes not one particle of statesmanship to propose that Donald Trump “desire[s] to rule as a king by decree” and “relish[es] the opportunity to try to invoke or wield emergency powers.” Yawn.

When the framers of the Constitution proposed including provisions for impeachment in the Constitution, they were not naïve to the dangerous potential of factions to abuse the procedures for political purposes. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 65, wrote that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community.” Furthermore, he wrote, “there will always be the greatest danger, that the decision [to impeach] will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

Hamilton’s words are so perceptive for our contemporary times. He went on in his essay to address himself to the New York anti-federalists who were against ratification of the Constitution. He defended the Constitution by saying that the plan of government it proposed was not perfect. But perfection was an impossible standard. Rather than arguing that the Constitution was merely flawed, that it had blind spots, that it did not account for every possible circumstance relevant to government, the opponents of the Constitution needed to demonstrate “that the plan upon the whole is bad and pernicious.”

We would do well to heed Hamilton’s admonition to the anti-federalists. On both the left and the right, there are those who would argue that the Constitution is a failure, that liberalism has had its day, and that what is needed is a new order. On the left, that new order is predicated on abolishing the Electoral College, changing the structure of the Supreme Court, enforcing atheistic sexual and gender ideologies to the level of the individual conscience, and punishing speech that questions those ideologies. On the right, the new order calls for a state established religion headed by a king-priest in order to enforce theological conformity and suppress political and religious dissent. Such chimeric visions—revolutionary on the left, counter-revolutionary on the right—all stand opposed to the Constitution of the United States.

Mobocracy is also counter to the Constitution, even a mobocracy that would screech “Impeach” every time the guy in charge says or does something obnoxious to the sensibilities of the hearers. As the written articulation of our frame of government, the Constitution is a document that specifically lays out what political power consists of, where sovereignty lies, how power is to be divided, and procedures for keeping power scattered and unconcentrated.

It is extremely difficult, in our constitutional system, for a president to be impeached and convicted. That is by design. Like the process of amending the Constitution, impeachment is as serious as it gets, and the framers wisely made it very difficult to see the matter through. No president in our history has ever been impeached and removed from office. By contrast, the threat of impeachment has been deployed for presidents, Supreme Court justices, and others many times in our history.

The threat of impeachment from leftist pols feeling the heat from their constituencies should ring hollow in the ears of citizens. And caterwauls about the obsolescence of the Constitution should, too.