OK, people. Think like a prosecutor for a minute. His job, in general, is not to decide guilt or innocence – that’s up to the judge and/or jury – but to decide, for each case, “Can I get a conviction on this? On what charge(s)?” His gut reaction that the guy may be guilty as a small child with a smeared face standing next to an opened and half-consumed box of chocolates, does not count. He needs to prove to a court of law that the guy is guilty of a criminal charge.
Slight variation for the House: they get to decide what an “impeachable offense” might be. But in their thinking, they must be guided by what’s likely to get a conviction in the Court for the Trial of Impeachments, i.e., the Senate. Doing an impeachment where no conviction is likely is apt to redound on the impeachers, as it did with Clinton.
Second point: While we may discuss hypotheticals (“Could Arnold Schwarzenegger get elected to three terms if the relevant portions of the Constitution were amended?”), there’s a very practical attitude in the general populace of the U.S. that impeachment should be reserved for the most heinous of offenses, e.g., the attempted wholescale subversion of an election by a sitting Administration that happened in Watergate, or being a Federal judge who is self-evidently a drunkard while on the bench and arguably insane.
Doing things that annoy Republican majorities in Congress is insufficient grounds (the Johnson and Clinton impeachments). It doesn’t take much effort for the Democrats to claim the moral high ground there and refuse to impeach for annoying a Democratic majority – the ‘moral high ground’ is equivalent to the ‘highest mountain in Florida.’
Now, if we can get clear incontrovertible proof that Rove, Diebold, et al. subverted either the 2000 or 2004 election and that Bush was complicit in their schemes (notice the “if” – this is not a thread to make that accusation), that’s grounds on the Watergate precedent. If Mr. Bush willfully subverts a clear passage of the Constitution to further his policy, and let me be clear that I’m not talking what I think it means but a clear Constitutional mandate or proscription that, say, Bricker would agree that that’s just what it says, that’s a definite high crime or misdemeanor.
Allow me to be clear – I despise 85% of the man’s policies. I hold him morally guilty for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, including over a thousand U.S. soldiers and unknown numbers of innocent Iraqis (as well as a bunch of guilty Iraqis). If I were King Polycarp I of America and he my prime minister, I’d have fired him long since.
But what we are talking about here is a balanced and temperate response, proportionate to the situation. I would love to see him drawn through the same dirt as Bill Clinton was, every peccadillo since that regrettable incident at boarding school brought into the public eye.
But it would do no good, and substantial harm, to do so without any reasonable chance of removing him from office. And even then, we’d have set a new precedent that there are situations that justify removing a President from office. As it stands now, there are only two reasons for getting rid of a President that have set precedent: he’s dead, Jim; and he joined in a conspiracy to subvert the opposition to his own re-election. I think we need to think long and hard about what we want to add to that.
