The constitution calls for impeachment for treason or undefined “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment is a political process so the General Questions answer to what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors is “whatever the House wants to impeach the president for.” I’m asking, however, for your opinion about what actions you believe should be subject to impeachment. Poll to come. Please check all that apply.
This is a non-exclusive list of impeachable conduct so while there may be other categories of actions that you feel are impeachable, these are the ones I’m asking about.
Wikipedia lists the 19 federal officials for whom impeachment proceedings were instituted and referred to a committee of the House of Representatives. Here were the accusations made against them:
I’m not asking people’s opinions of when the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury for Capital Markets should be impeached. I’m also not asking for a history lesson. I’m asking your opinion of which of the categories I describe are circumstances when the president should be impeached. If you were responding before the poll was up, I invite you you complete the poll. Thanks!
I’d consider impeachment to only be appropriate in two instances:
If a president does something that is illegal and very serious;
If a president does things that are just terribly embarrassing even if not illegal (i.e., show up at United Nations General Assembly wearing nothing but underwear)
Those “any”s throw me. Degree matters. In general-
Abuse of power in a way that attempts to subvert the balance of power between the branches or the election itself or major abuses for other personal gains. The more the abuse threatens the system itself the more impeachable it is. Illegal is not strictly required for that abuse of power and attack on the Constitution itself.
Hmm, this poll jumps from “policy decisions” to “illegal”. Where’s “blatantly unethical and damaging to the country/institutions, but not strictly/provably illegal” category?
I’d also add that my personal threshold would be “preponderance of evidence” not “beyond a reasonable doubt” for anything actually illegal. I see impeachment as more akin to shareholders firing the CEO than a criminal trial.
I think it should rather less easy to do than that — as much as I hate to say it, the will of the people (compromised as it might be by the electoral college system) on Election Day should be difficult to overturn, surely.
Well ok, maybe the CEO model is too far the other way, I’m assuming the removal is “for cause/ethical lapse that prevents the CEO from being considered trustworthy” and not just poor company performance.
Frankly, in my humble opinion, most of the things that are unambiguously unethical are also illegal (though certainly not all). When you talk about things that are “damaging to the country/institutions” but which are legal, in my opinion, you are talking about policy decisions unless you have some specific example in mind that doesn’t fit into that category. Again, the poll isn’t all encompassing; it’s just the things I was interested in.
My motives are idle curiosity. For what it’s worth, I was hoping to tease out diversity of viewpoints with some examples. People use different theories to assert that our current president is or isn’t impeachable now. There are various frameworks to consider whether a president is impeachable, notably:
Maximalists: Impeachment any time for any reason.
Minimalists: Never, for any reason, because it’s too disruptive and checks and balances limit the damage of a bad president.
Time period covered: The most common view among scholars and historians seems to be that you can only impeach for conduct that takes place during a president’s term, however, I wanted to explore what people thought about either bad conduct they didn’t know about during the election or malfeasance that took place during the election or interregnum. It seems to me that these should both be potential grounds for presidential impeachment even if it has never come up before.
Whether you can impeach because you don’t like how he’s running the place (i.e., policy disagreements). This is effectively why Andrew Johnson was impeached but no president has been impeached on similar grounds since. Historians say that we decided policy decisions aren’t impeachable conduct. I’m curious if dopers agree. I think if things are bad enough, this too should be impeachable.
There are certainly other categories of impeachable conduct. For example, we have at least one professed minimalist but perhaps if I’d added treason, they would have thought differently. But since treason is right in the constitution, it’s not an interesting question to me.
Impeachment is merely charging the president, not trying or convicting him although this isn’t a critical distinction for this discussion. I agree that preponderance of the evidence is probably the highest standard I could accept but, frankly, if the charge were treason by a president colluding with a wartime enemy to undermine America, perhaps the standard should be “enough evidence that we doubt your loyalty and can’t take the risk even if you probably didn’t do it.”
