So the thinking is, among some
Republicans, including Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee, that Obama has not committed acts that warrant impeachment, that his
record is free of the kinds of crimes warranting impeachment.
Beg pardon, but the Constitution
is where Congressman Bob Goodlatte should start a search for the scope,
meaning, and application of the Constitution’s provisions regarding impeachment.
There, in plain language, impeachment is allowed for treason, bribery, and
other high crimes and misdemeanors. And if Goodlatte demurs that he cannot find
a meaning of "high crimes and misdemeanors," then I would direct him
to a source undoubted in its standing as the First Word, if not the last one,
on the meaning of the Constitution. That source, of course, is the Federalist
Papers.
In The Federalist No. 65,
Alexander Hamilton, writing as Publius, turns to a question of the
decision by the Constitutional Convention to assign to the Senate the power to
serve as the "Court for the Trial of Impeachments." He wants it to be
understood why the Senate, not the House, not the Courts, not some other body
was to be preferred for trials of persons impeached by the House. To move to
that question, he first takes note of what manner of questions and conduct
would bring an officer of the United
States , even the Chief Executive, before
such a court.
And it is answering the answering
of that question that Publius clarifies the matter for Goodlatte:
"those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."
If you don't have your own copy
of the Federalist Papers, but want to scope out Hamilton 's
argument in full, it is available online in many locations, including at Yale University
For now, though, I thought it sufficient to begin re-thinking the error of Goodlatte's assertion with
Publius/Hamilton's own careful construction of the offenses that fall within
the scope of impeachment. Publius explained, again, that impeachable offenses
are ones that "proceed from the misconduct of public men ... from the
abuse or violation of some public trust[, t]hey are of a nature which may be
... denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately
to the society itself."
While Goodlatte seems focused on the absence of some video of Obama taking a multi-billion dollar bribe from George Soros or the like, or of using an electrical prod on a helpless child as a means of feeding some twisted sense of sexual delight, or perhaps even of swiping candy from a baby, THAT IS DECIDEDLY NOT with what the impeachment power is principally concerned.
Instead, in the view of
Publius/Hamilton, the nature of the wrongs to be accounted for in impeachment
are those that:
- proceed from misconduct
- of public men
- by the abuse of some
political trust or
- the violation of some
public trust, acts that can and will be, in the main,
- denominated POLITICAL in
nature and which
- relate chiefly to
injuries done immediately to our society itself.
Now, if Goodlatte thinks that
Obama's actions do not qualify for impeachment, then, to be honest, the voters
of Virginia can do nothing better to improve the common lot of us all than to
vote for someone other than Goodlatte in the fall.
So what injuries, denominated as
political, has Obama inflicted on our society?
Begin with the retooling of the
Internal Revenue Service as a tool for the suppression of disagreement with the
President, as a tool for the prevention of education about the Constitution, its
meaning and its application to our times and troubles.
Continue with the likely actual
crime of the destruction, not of one or two IRS computer hard drives, but of
SEVEN; the naked cover up of criminality by the Chief Law Enforcement officers
of the United States
is a grave injury to society itself.
Continue from there.
What about Obamacare, the
so-called Affordable Care Act. Even if all that it represents is the bumbling
and abysmal stupidity of putting in charge of the start up of a national
program for the federal insurance exchange a Canadian company that lost
contracts in their home country for the same reasons of unpreparedness,
indolence, and failure, it is too much. Having
as our Chief Executive one who hires buffoons and incompetents suffices to
state the ground of injury to society itself.
Do not stop with the terribly
incompetent roll-out of Obamacare. Because there is more to the problem than
that sign-ups for Obamacare were frustrated by the fifth-rate incompetence of
the website designers. We were, as a Nation, sold this bill of goods on the
claim of its essentiality to our national economic health. We were told of the
importance of this NATIONAL MANDATE, of the harms that having such uncertainty
govern the affairs of an economic enterprise that constitutes one sixth of our
entire national economy. As it turned out, however, the Chief Executive
immediately began doling out exceptions and exclusions from mandates in the
act, and delaying implementation of provisions of it.
Exclusions and exceptions went to
industries and unions whose cooperation are/were essential to the success of
the Administration's ongoing enterprises. A simple matter of quid-pro-quo
lifting of requirements based on claims of need. Delays, as we know, were
imposed in order to give the Democratic Party what it really needed: a time
machine. They needed then, and need now, NOT TO HAVE a bruised and broken
electorate going to the polls on November 4, 2014, remembering who it was,
which party it was, that single-handedly delivered our health insurance, our
health care, into the maws of the great leviathan, the federal government. So
delay, delay, delay.
What is missed for many though is
the meaning for the whole enterprise of Obamacare to be drawn from delays,
exceptions and exclusions. An enterprise that is so swiss-cheesed on the basis
of partisan interests of industries, unions and politicians may be many things,
but it is hard to argue that it is an essential one.
No sense stopping at Obamacare,
given this Administration's decisions to run guns. Fast and Furious, of course,
run by Attorney General Holder, put guns into the hands of Mexican cartel drug
lords. Some of those guns came back to the United States and were even used to
kill American federal employees. Just as evil, others of those guns stayed in Mexico ; in one
of the most heart-rending instances, the guns were used to slaughter 12-, 13-
and 14-year old girls attending a birthday party.
But Obama's gun running extends
beyond Fast and Furious. The Benghazi story, when it is fully told, will detail
the movement of arms from us, to Libyan based affiliates of al Qaeda, and
across the northern coast of African to al Qaeda affiliates in Syria responsible
for killing other Muslims, Christians and Christian clerics, occasional
beheadings, the bizarre scene of man taking a bite out of another man's heart,
and the rest.
There is more. Frankly, there is too
much more. That Goodlatte believes that the basis for impeaching Obama does not
exist leaves me with a dread sense that the one truly representative body of
our federal government is captained by the ignorant or the damned.
