Impeachment after the fact

      1 Comment on Impeachment after the fact

I am getting really cross about the comments surrounding the question of whether it’s Constitutional to impeach a former President.

Not the comments from the Other Party, which are mostly nonsense—I expect that. The ones that have been getting up my nose are the ones mocking the idea that the House and Senate can’t impeach and convict a former President. Lines such as Trevor Noah’s “If you get fired at Best Buy, they don’t just let you steal a TV on the way out”, or Stephen Colbert’s “That’s like acquitting Jeffrey Dahmer because he’s full.” I’ve seen a bunch of similar joke-like things from my friends as well.

But here’s the thing: Our Previous President can (and should) be prosecuted for any crimes he committed while in office. Whether the Senate convicts him is irrelevant to that. In fact, it’s sort of extra-irrelevant, since there’s an argument that the sitting President can’t be prosecuted while in office. If that’s true, then the only way to prosecute a sitting President who has committed a crime is to impeach and remove him, and if his Party won’t do that, then justice is at best delayed, and quite likely denied. But if a sitting President commits a crime two weeks before he leaves office, then prosecution is barely delayed at all!

Here’s my point: we should not think of impeachment and removal as a punishment. Impeachment (and removal—from here on out I will talk about them together and call them ‘impeachment’ if that’s all right) is a safeguard. It’s the only way to remove a dangerous President without violence. It’s a terrible, terrible thing for our country to get to the point of having to impeach a President, but sometimes it would be worse to let the person stay in office, so there it is.

What, then, is the purpose of impeaching a former President?

First of all, it’s not unconstitutional or anything—the Constitution clearly leaves it up to the House and Senate to decide what the rules of impeachment should be, so if they want to impeach Franklin Pearce and bar him from holding future office, they can go ahead and do that. It’s up to them, and it’s a political decision, meaning that they will live with the political consequences of whatever they decide, not a judicial or fact-finding one.

But why do it? There are (I think) two reasons to impeach a former President who is no longer in power and no longer an immediate danger. First is in order to bar that person from holding office again, and that’s legitimate (and in this case, I think, important and worth doing). Normally, of course, if the former President’s own Party rejects him even mildly, there would be no question of future political office, but in this case, given a variety of circumstances, the Party should make it official. If, of course, they want to dissociate themselves from his actions—if they don’t, then they should at least consider nominating him again in 2024, right? Ugh.

The second reason is to draw a line and say: this is behavior that should get a person impeached—any future President would know it, and any future Congress would know it. I think that’s worth doing in this instance as well, although less on the incitement-to-riot front and more on the harassing-state-election-officials front. On the other hand, any President who had the nerve to try to use the power of the office to rig the election isn’t going to be stopped by a previous President having been caught and impeached. Richard Nixon’s removal certainly wasn’t a deterrent over the past few years, and it’s at the very least hard to say with confidence that a post-election impeachment would deter some future autocrat in the White House. And, of course, it’s too late already: impeaching the President for inciting a riot would just clarify that using the weight of the Presidency to push foreign governments to dig up dirt on the political opposition is on the safe side of the impeachment line.

Do I sound ambivalent? I’m not really. Given where we are now, and given the inability to go back and fix anything in the past, impeachment was the correct move, and the Senate should vote to convict. But doing so will not fix anything, not in practical terms, and (absent criminal prosecution) it will not be punishment for any criminal activity, much less justice.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

1 thought on “Impeachment after the fact

  1. Vardibidian Post author

    This note was already too long and prolix, but it might be worth thinking about the only argument I can come up with against impeachment, which is that it’s possible that investigating the relationship between QAnon (vaddevah dat turns out to actually mean) and the White House would be better done by a Select Committee or something like that, and that doing it as part of impeachment would make the investigation more difficult. I don’t know how or even if Congress is planning to investigate at all, or if there would be even the slightest chance of the Other Party participating with good faith if it did, but I think that investigation is more important than impeachment, and if impeachment would hinder it, then that’s a reason not to complete the impeachment. Otherwise, the ‘sides’ are, it seems to me, between impeachment being very important or being less important but still worth doing.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply

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