The fundamental problem with the USA impeachment process as prescribed in the Constitution is the individuals adjudicating the process have a personal vested interest in the outcome.
That is, since an impeachment or removal from office of political party A will hurt political party A, members of political party A have an incentive to vote against it, no matter the evidence. Members of political party B conversely have an incentive to vote for it, no matter the evidence.
This is fundamentally injust. It would be like forming a jury for a criminal trial half of enemies of the accused and half of close family members for the accused.
Discuss. Have any democracies with newer Constitutions written a patch for this bug?
Please note it doesn’t matter the identities of political parties A or B or what politician is currently committing malfeasance.
This ‘bug’ also acts as a way to prevent impeachment from becoming a simple political expedient, since you not only have to convince the enemies of the accused but also at least some of the close family.
Very few of the world’s democracies have our presidential system. In most systems the government is made of members of the parliament and serves at the pleasure of the parliament. Governments can be and frequently are voted out and no one considers it an extraordinary happening. If one party should have a majority they can perfectly well elect a new executive of their own party. Note that if the senate should convict Trump, the Republican vice president would take over and also choose a new VP. It may well be in the interests of the party to do this.
Would Iceland count as a good example? The populace didn’t like how badly into debt their government got them, so they fired the government, rewrote their constitution, and elected a new government. The individual members of the new government have a personal vested interest in not getting fired, rather than adhering to the party line.
It can be amended by two successive votes in parliament, but with a general election intervening - so, one parliament votes to make an amendment, then after the next general election the new parliament votes in favour of the same amendment. This means it can’t be amended quickly but, still, a simple majority in parliament is enough to carry both votes.
But Ethilrist is mistaken to say that the populace “rewrote the constitituion” after the Global Financial Crisis. There certainly was a major political crisis in Iceland, and there was a proposal to revise the constitution through a process involving citizens assemblies. But the proposed amendments that emerged from that process were never carried through. Iceland is still governed by the 1944 Constitution, as last amended in 1999.
Hold politicians accountable for their actions. If the members of a party try to impeach a President of an opposing party for negligible reasons or, conversely, refuse to impeach a President of their own party when he has clearly committed impeachable crimes, then vote the members of the offending party out of office.
You may not be able to force people to act on principals but you can usually convince them to put their own self-interest ahead of party loyalty.
In parliamentary democracies, this works (or should work) the other way. It’s not in the party’s interests to be identified with an incompetent, a crook or a charlatan, so quite often the probem is solved internally, with the party ditching a leader in whom it no longer has confidence, rather than externally, with other parties acting to remove the leader from public office through impeachment or similar processes.
Democracies with both older and newer Constitutions don’t need a patch.
Your Founding Fathers wrote this bug in. (I’m guessing they assumed everybody would play this game as grown ups).
The problem is not so much as evidence as to the charge.
If one party were to have the requisite super-majorities then a POTUS of the other political persuasion could be impeached for wearing brown socks with black shoes if that egregious act was considered a “high crime and misdemeanor”. Conversely, were POTUS of the same party as the super-majority they could walk into the Kremlin with the nuclear codes and walk out with a personal line of credit but impeachment might not even be initiated.
I reckon that’s a very neat precis of the argument.
Quite. OP’s problem is predicated on having a quasi-judicial criminal process, without actually defining a crime (or doing so ad hoc)
In the system I know about, it’s enough for a Prime Minister’s own party to decide they’re sufficiently “damaged goods” (for whatever reasons) to be made (one way or another) to stand down. Or to put it another way, it is assumed to be the vested interest of the governing party that the PM’s continuation in office is in their interest - until it isn’t (by definition, for the opposition, their vested interest is the opposite). If enough members think they’ll lose the next election under the existing leadership, then sooner or later it’s goodbye and goodnight.
And crimes, misdemeanours and the whole panjandrum of a quasi-judicial process don’t come into it. If a PM commits a criminal offence, normal criminal law processes would apply.
Other countries have a variety of arrangements, a fair few with some sort of Constitutional Court:
Impeachment hasn’t been done here since since the early 19th c., - I had thought Warren Hastings was the last one, but it appears that someone more obscure was impeached a bit later - and there are grounds for saying it would be incompatible with the Human Rights Act’s requirement for a fair and impartial tribunal.
Nitpick: elect a new executive from their own party, not of they own party. Even single-party states are careful to maintain a distinction (at least nominally) between the political party and the government offices to which its members are elected/appointed. The executive of any given ruling political party probably doesn’t contain the same offices, and doesn’t necessarily contain the same people, as the executive of the government.
One of the clearest examples of PatrickLondon’s “damaged goods” principle was Maggie Thatcher. The Conservatives decided that she was getting too extreme and heading the party over a cliff, so they seized control of the steering wheel and kicked her out of the car.
Less dramatic but just as sure was the Liberals in Canada getting rid of PM Jean Chrétien in 2003.
And it’s got nothing to do with allegations of “high crimes” and a “trial”. It’s a purely political decision: “time to go, mate. Someone else will be better.”
In Spain that is theoretically possible at any level of government, but it requires the kind of meltdown which is likely to bring down that government anyway. Normally if a President is succeeded by another from the same party there will have been Parliamentary elections in between. Abnormally: see Catalonia in the last couple of years.
But a big difference with the American situation is that even when and where we’re closest to two-party alternance, it is rare to be able to get enough votes for a moción de censura* to pass without getting votes from multiple parties. So you have vested interests, but you have to combine those of several parties. Note that the two largest ones are actually pretty close in terms of actual policies, despite very different origins.
call it an “impeachment vote”, although it’s more frequent on grounds of incompetence than for criminal activity.