More Impeachments
Republicans want to impeach Biden, just like Democrats wanted to impeach Trump
The Founding Fathers knew that the executive branch could be dangerous. As Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and the office of the presidency would be the single most powerful position created by the newly drafted Constitution. The founders knew that an effective executive branch required a powerful leader to make tough decisions, particularly in times of war. But they also knew that the power of the position could easily be abused. To mitigate the risk of a tyrannical president, the founders put a few safeguards in place. One of those safeguards was impeachment.
Impeachment is a power granted to our legislative branch as a fail-safe to remove corrupted presidents and bureaucrats. The founders knew they could not prescribe the exact behaviors that would warrant impeachment, so they provided a short list in Article II that is intentionally open to interpretation: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. Of these crimes, treason is the only one defined in the constitution (see Article III, Section 3). The founders left it up to the legislative branch to determine exactly what constitutes bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors.
Due to the interpretive nature of impeachment, the process has been wantonly applied over the course of US history. Three presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. Many other presidents have had articles of impeachment brought against them, but those articles were either voted down or were never brought to a formal vote (as was the case for Nixon). Now, yet again, we see an impeachment process underway for President Biden.
Biden’s impeachment is being characterized as a cynical political stunt, like many of the impeachments of the past. That characterization is probably true. Biden’s impeachment circumstances clearly mirror the circumstances of Trump’s 2019 impeachment. In both cases, the circumstances involve accusations of bribery of foreign entities for domestic political gain. In Trump’s case, Democrats accused him of bribing the Ukrainian government with US funds to get dirt on his political opponent, Biden. In Biden’s case, Republicans are accusing him of bribing the Ukrainian government with US funds to get favoritism for his son, and likely financier, Hunter Biden. The similarities would be humorous if this was not real life.
Despite the similarities, not a single Republican voted to impeach Trump in 2019. Now, in 2023, most Democrats are on the record indicating or promising to vote against impeaching Biden. If that does not prove that both impeachments were political stunts, then I do not see what would prove it.
Honestly though, we have a deeper problem. The legislative branch has bequeathed an absurd amount of power to the executive branch over the last 120 years or so. The executive branch regularly creates what effectively amount to laws via executive regulations and executive orders. For us to regain our freedoms and diminish the ever-growing sphere of the federal government, we need our legislature to reacquire its lost power. The legislature should be the only branch of the government creating law, not the executive branch. If the legislature decides to start impeaching members of the executive branch to instill some fear into our federal employees, that would be great. Showing the executive branch that the legislative branch means business would be a healthy move.
It would be ideal for the legislative branch to impeach executive members specifically for instances of executive overreach. For example, if Biden should be impeached for anything, it should have been for the unquestionably unconstitutional student loan bailout he tried to force through. The executive branch needs to be taught that it does not control spending policy. As for Trump, one example of executive overreach was the use of Tile 42 during the COVID scare. Immigration policy is up to the legislature, not the executive. The executive needs to know that.
Our legislature must get its act together and reclaim its turf. Impeachment is one of the tools it could use. It would be best if the motivations for impeachment were better, but even these cynical impeachments may do some good by making impeachment more commonplace going forward.