Authored by Noah Feldman, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,
Trump and the House Democrats have turned it into a political game. That’s not what the Constitution’s framers had in mind...
Impeachment has jumped the shark. The episode that proves it is the one in which serious, informed politicians are wondering if President Donald Trump actually wants to be impeached for political advantage and is trying to goad Democrats into obliging him.
It would be impossible to imagine a more preposterous scenario under the Constitution and in the history of the presidency. Impeachment was intended by the constitutional framers as a highly serious option reserved for only the most extraordinary, egregious violations of the rule of law. Today’s discussion treats impeachment as a trivialized gambit within the ordinary game of electoral politics. The undermining of the constitutional ideal is near-total. It’s almost laughable.
To be clear, impeachment itself is and has long been a matter of high seriousness. Not so long ago, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency to avoid the historic disgrace of being impeached. President Bill Clinton toughed it out, famously. But neither he nor anyone else doubted that his impeachment, however motivated by partisanship, became a permanent stain on his personal and presidential legacy. Whether you think that Clinton was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors or not, it mattered enormously that he was just the second president in 200 years to be impeached. The House Republicans pushing his impeachment weren’t just saying that they wanted to make it harder for Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, to win the next election. They were making the argument that Clinton was a genuine criminal who had subverted the justice system by lying under oath.
Fast forward 20 years. When critics of the Trump presidency started discussing impeachment almost as soon as he took office, they meant to do much more than achieve some political advantage. Or at least I did. In my role as a constitutional law professor, I wrote several essays trying to make sense of the law, history and theory of impeachment. I went back and read books on the subject going back to the 1970s.
I wasn’t alone. Two of my most distinguished colleagues at Harvard Law, Laurence Tribe and Cass Sunstein, each wrote full length books on the ins and outs of impeachment. Both had worked for President Barack Obama. Yet both went to great lengths to avoid saying that Trump deserved to be impeached on the basis of available evidence. Instead, they provided nuanced analysis of constitutional precedent and logic. The point of the exercise was to help guide the public in a rational, nonpartisan way through the thickets of possible constitutional crisis.
Of course, no scholar or expert would deny that there is a political aspect to impeachment. Some politics is inherent in a constitutional structure that places impeachment responsibility in the House of Representatives and the trial to remove a president in the Senate. The framers may have been idealistic, but they weren’t naive. They knew that elected politicians would not be free of political motivation. Nevertheless, they also made successful impeachment and removal very difficult, precisely to discourage Congress from taking the whole process lightly. They chose words with grand implications — “high crimes” — to underscore that removing the president outside of elections must not be undertaken lightly.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-28/harvard-law-prof-hard-take-impeachment-calls-seriously-now?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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