Impeachment: Don’t go there

Every political alignment has its more ideologically extreme members. They, presumably, consider themselves ideologically principled. On the Right, they often rap themselves in the Constitution and the Flag. Fair enough. These folks serve a purpose because often they push the debate on policy and give a voice to issues that turns out later to be prescient. But too often they come across as strident and even demented. This effort to launch a movement to impeach President Obama is one of those moonbattery moments among the Right.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air thoroughly explains the political and constitutional foolishness of such an effort at this time. I fully agree with the message of his posting. Obama’s actions so far do not meet the constitutional understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under even the most generous reading. Democrats will not launch impeachment proceedings even if the evidence of qualifying wrongdoing by Obama were orders of magnitude clearer. If anything, the Congressional leadership considers Obama insufficiently committed to the radical cause. For the Republican minority to press such an issue would not only be fruitless, it would be politically suicidal. It would allow the Democrats to shift attention from their disastrous policies onto comparisons of personality. And, whatever their political skills, House Minority Leader Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell cannot match the President’s propaganda machine or his on-camera telepromptered charisma.

The American public punished the Republicans politically for the dubious impeachment efforts directed at President Clinton. Those Republicans at least had perjury and obstruction of justice as predicate offenses by the President. Any attempt to replicate such efforts against Obama would tar the Republicans and invite a political backlash that the GOP cannot afford. It would waste an increasingly promising opportunity to expose the Democrats on their substantive radicalism to slow them down in 2010 and beyond. The American people are not forgiving of contrived impeachment efforts or other tactics that are unnecessarily divisive and alter political issues into legal or quasi-legal ones.

That is one reason why I have not been unduly concerned about efforts by the extreme Left, as represented among a number of the faculty at my school, to prosecute Bush-era officials. The Democrats would pay dearly politically for such a course, and I do not see Obama pursuing it unless he felt supremely confident of his political position. Given his eroding approval ratings, that is unlikely. Or, Obama feels driven into a political corner with nothing to lose. He is nowhere near that, given the difficult struggle for his ambitious and radical domestic agenda.

I, along with Ed Morrissey, am also sick and tired of the Nazi-comparisons coming from both sides. This is done far less often by the Right than by the Left (during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and now against anyone who dares to express disapproval of Obama policies at town hall meetings). But when the Right does it, it is equally despicable and over-the-top, unless there is a direct and relevant factual comparison. Here, there is not.

There are plenty of troubling policy initiatives that threaten disastrous economic and social consequences, but neither Obama nor the Democrats are carting peaceful American dissenters off to camps any more than Bush and Cheney were doing through the Patriot Act. There are plenty of personality cult stirrings in the administration and its supporters. It is perfectly legitimate to point out the similarities of both the President and his supporters in this regard to the natural dynamic between the totalitarian leader in history and his followers. But it is not legitimate to call him Hitler until he, well, starts to act like Hitler in his policies.

I disagree with Morrissey’s column on one minor point. He accepts that a reading of Federalist 65 (though not the Constitution’s text) supports the claim that impeachment can be done for political reasons. Not exactly. Hamilton agreed that impeachment was not simply a criminal process. Hence, someone could be tried in the courts for conduct that led to his impeachment, without violating double jeopardy or due process. But to assert that the process was, at some level, “quasi-political,” not “legal,” does not validate the use of the procedure for purely political differences.

Hamilton is clear about that distinction between process and substance. The process could only be used for misconduct that, even if it did not amount to criminal bahavior, showed unfitness for office by undermining the constitutional order. English practice that, in the 17th century, had allowed impeachment for purely political differences during the Long Parliament of Charles I, by the latter part of the 17th century already required more solid, non-political cause. Early American state constitutional practice that had flirted with the purely political model of impeachment, had moved to the language and custom reflected in the U.S. Constitution, as well. Hamilton recognized those roots, affirmatively citing the English precedent. Impeachments, therefore, are never pursued on the formal grounds of even severe political differences, though such political squabbles may fuel the decision to pursue impeachment for conduct that otherwise would be ignored.