Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: The Impeachment Process--A Modest Proposal
Author: Eric J. Bowersox Posted: 12/23/1998; 1:22:22 AM Topic: DaveNet comments Msg #: 1695 (In response to 1688) Prev/Next: 1694 / 1696
Thank you for your kind response.Your comment on Nixon got me thinking, and I did a little research. The impeachment of Nixon never did come to a full vote in the House (Nixon resigned before they could get to it), yet, of the three articles of impeachment that were passed by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974, at least one article (the first, charging obstruction of justice) was passed by a vote of 27-11, or 71 percent. It would not be unreasonable to assume that this article, had it been submitted to the full House, would have been passed by a similar majority...plus or minus a fraction, but almost certainly remaining at or above 67 percent, or two-thirds.
Let me go into the two-thirds requirement proposal a little more in depth here...First of all, by its very nature, impeachment is, or should be, a last-ditch, rare procedure. (In more than 200 years of United States government under the Constitution, a very small handful of people have been impeached, including only one President prior to Clinton.) Second, of all the "civil officers" subject to impeachment as laid out in Article II, Section 4, the President and Vice-President are the only two whose assumption of their respective offices reflect the expressed will of the voters, all the rest being appointed by direct or indirect Presidential authority. Impeaching and removing one of them amounts to repudiating the outcome of a national election, something that should never be done lightly, and, when taken to extremes (which we are seeing here, IMHO), reflects behavior on the part of Congress that comes dangerously close to violating the principle of separation of powers.
Under this new proposal, a Presidential impeachment and removal could happen in only one of two circumstances: either the President's opposition party holds a solid two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress (in which case, the President is in a serious bind whether he's impeached or not), or the President's offenses under consideration as part of the impeachment process would be sufficiently heinous to warrant at least *some* degree of solid bipartisan support for his impeachment and removal. (Solid bipartisan support is exactly what the current impeachment has been lacking.)
Some sources have opined that the current impeachment of Clinton, and, in fact, the effort by some Republicans to undermine Clinton from the day he was elected, stems at least partly from a desire for vengeance on the part of Republicans for what happened to Nixon, and to other Republicans such as Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. My fear is that this cycle of vengeance will continue in the future; that, next time a Republican is elected President, the Democrats will pursue him just as vigorously, possibly even including impeachment (if the Congressional Democrats wind up in roughly the same position the Republicans are in today). All this intriguing and counter-intriguing will ultimately be at the expense of this country and its ordinary citizens. The proposal I put forth represents an attempt to preserve impeachment for the purposes for which it was originally designed, yet keep it from being used as a tool for partisan vengeance. To quote Jean-Luc Picard (in Star Trek: First Contact), "The line must be drawn here. This far, no farther."
Tinkering with the Constitution is something that should never be done lightly; the history of Prohibition stands as testimony to that. Much as a programmer might tweak a couple of lines of code inside a function to remove an unintended side-effect, the proposal that I have put forth would "tweak" the rules for impeachment in a very small way to remove the kind of unintended side-effects we are seeing now. These kind of tweaks are not without precedent; the Twelfth, Twentieth, and Twenty-Second Amendments are similar in nature.
I do not believe that my proposal would make impeachments against Presidents more difficult to seek; it would just ensure that, if and when a bill of impeachment against a President is passed by the House, the citizens of this country could be more assured that it reflects, not a partisan attempt to damage or weaken the President politically, but a clear, unequivocal, and unbiased belief by members of the House that they can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the commission of acts by the President that demonstrate his unfitness to hold the highest executive office in the land.
Eric
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